The OGC Business Value Committee (BVC) will directly engage senior managers, commercial, sales and marketing professionals from the OGC membership in activities to identify, organize and promote the business value of OGC standards. These activities include a long-term vision to develop (through case studies and reference implementations) a pervasive value platform for using OGC and complementary standards; as well as defining a business model to address a Standards Value Model, incorporating both costs and benefits.  The BVC will also provide a website in which OGC members may quickly and easily find business value data for use in their own domains and presentations.

The mission of the BVC is to

1)  Assess the effort (costs) and outcomes (benefits) required to successfully use geospatial standards

2)  Understand and articulate the advantages of developing and using OGC standards

3)  Enable the wider community of stakeholders to leverage business value as a tool to foster investment and implementation

 

The BVC will assess the return on investment requirements in line with the value of geospatial standards and highlight how using OGC® standards can offer value across the community in a cost-effective and sustainable manner.

The Business Value Committee email list is open to both members and non-members. Subscribe to the list here.

 

 

The OGC Planning Committee is granted authority to operate by the OGC Bylaws. Principal Membership is provided for organizations that wish to participate in the planning and management of the Consortium's technology development process.

The OGC membership process is operationally organized into groups and subgroups, each group having a specified role and level of responsibility. There are three major groups, called Committees: The Technical, the Planning and the Strategic Management Advisory Committees.

The Technical Committee is responsible for all aspects of the formal consensus OGC specification process. This includes:

• Coordinate development of and modifications to the OpenGIS Abstract Specification;
• Coordinate development and adoption of OpenGIS Implementation Specifications;
• Act on specification change proposals (acceptance, rejection, and conditional acceptance);
• Many responsibilities concerning evaluation, approval and recommendations of various documents and proposals.

Above all, the Technical Committee provides an open forum for professional discussion of issues and items related to the consensus development and/or evaluation and approval of specifications that provide the ability to build and deploy interoperable geospatial solutions in the larger IT domain. The TC also has methodology in place to govern its composition, its meetings and meeting agendas, and voting procedures.

In order to carry out the business of the TC in a timely manner, three types of subgroups of the TC may be formed. These groups address the four major needs for activity within the TC:

• To deal with procedural and definitional tasks (subcommittees, SC);
• To work on new OpenGIS Specification or Abstract Specifications that have been proposed through the OGC RFC or RFP process; (Working Group)
• To discuss specific technology or user domain requirements for interoperability (Working Group);
• Single-purpose groups to work on revision of Adopted Specifications (revision working groups, RWG);

There are two Technical Committee Representatives to the Planning Committee. Currently those Representatives are:

An election is now required.

For more information regarding the roles, responsibilities and processes of the OGC Technical Committee, visit the Technical Committee Policies and Procedures.

The CITE Subcommittee provides guidance to and advise the OGC staff on the operation of the Compliance and Interoperability Testing and Evaluation Program (CITE) of the Consortium. The Sub committee provides a forum for an open, consensus discussion regarding approaches and issues related to conformance and interoperability testing becoming an integral component in the OGC standards process. Further, the Subcommittee works with members and OGC staff to insure there is a well understood process in place to insure that vendors can achieve OGC compliance certification in a timely, cost effective manner. The SC also serves as the portal for members to provide support directly to the CITE process. The CITE SC is a subgroup of the OGC Technical Committee.

The DocTeam will work with OGC staff and OGC members to define, enforce and educate on documentation guidelines (format, templates, style) within the OGC. It will work with OGC staff and OGC members to maintain strong linkages between the Implementation Specifications and the Abstract Specification with the goal of maintaining a core model upon which all OGC specifications and specification development activities are based.

The mission of the OAB is to provide a forum within which Consortium wide standards architecture issues can be discussed and deliberated with the intent of providing guidance and recommendations to the TC and the PC on these issues.

Specifically, the OGC Architecture Board works with the TC and the PC to insure architecture consistency of the Baseline and provide guidance to the OGC membership to insure strong life cycle management of the OGC standards baseline. In order to properly provide such guidance and perform the Governance functions as outlined below, the OAB can, at its discretion, evaluate current technology issues and identify gaps in the architecture that need to be responded to by the Membership.

The elected membership of the OAB as of the close of the October 2010 election are:

• Andreas Matheus, U. of Bundeswehr (ITIS)
• Arnulf Christl, Open Source Geospatial Foundation OSGeo
• Simon Cox, CSIRO
• Doug Nebert, USGS
• Frederic Houbie, Intergraph
• John Herring, Oracle
• Josh Lieberman, Deloitte
• Mike Botts, Botts Innovative Research
• Nicolas Lesage, IGN
• Paul Scarponcini, Bentley
• Rick Pearsall, Individual
• Satish Sankaran, ESRI

OAB Emeritus Members who have requested observer status:

• Ron Lake (Galdos)
• Charles Roswell, Individual
• Peter Vretanos (CubeWerx)

The Voting member representing OGC staff is George Percivall, OGC Chief Architect. The OAB is facilitated and Chaired by Carl Reed of OGC staff. The OAB Policies and Procedures can be downloaded from the OGC website.

The OGC NID (URN scheme- RFC 5165 (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc5165.html) established the OGC naming authority as responsible for reviewing and registering any proposed OGC urn usage. The OGC Naming Authority (OGC-NA) is a sub-committee of the OGC Technical Committee. 

In June 2010 OGC revised the naming policy to use http URIs to identify persistent OGC resources instead of URNs. The OGC-NA has developed a series of more detailed policies

• management of the OGC URI space http://www.opengis.net/doc/ogc-na-policies 
• identifiers for resources of particular scopes, including
• documents http://www.opengis.net/doc/doc-names
• definitions http://www.opengis.net/doc/def-names-1
• specification-elements http://www.opengis.net/doc/spec-names
• OGC-NA registers http://www.opengis.net/def/register/

These are available from http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/policies/directives.

The OGC-NA has a formal role in the process of publication of OGC Standards and other documents to review proposed persistent URI. A brief guideline for editors submitting URIs for review by OGC-NA is provided.

OGC-NA Chair: Simon Cox
Current list of OGCNA members: http://portal.opengeospatial.org/?m=projects&a=view&project_id=276&tab=1

 

The work of the REST Sub Committee of the OGC Standards Program is to define a set of best practices and potentially rules for use in creating REST serializations/instances of existing or furture OGC web services standards.

Chair: Josh Lieberman

Overview:
The 3D Information Management (3DIM) Domain Working Group is facilitating the definition and development of interface and encoding standards that enable software to develop solutions that allowinfrastructure owners, builders, emergency responders, community planners, and the traveling public to better manage and navigate complex built environments. Effective integration of these software data and services has eluded the geospatial and CAD industry for decades. Today, through the cooperation of diverse stakeholders, integrated infrastructure information systems will be achieved. OGC members and partners will work in an iterative development process to achieve incremental demonstrations of real solutions.

Background:
A great deal of technical innovation has been accomplished in the areas of CAD, AEC, geospatial, 3D visualization, and urban simulation. A variety of products, information and services abound in each of these environments. A framework of data interoperability should exist across the lifecycle of building and infrastructure investment: planning, design, construction, operation, and decommissioning. This work is of interest to the geospatial community in that there is a growing need for technologies and information to effectively interoperate between these domains to support a range of vital services and decision support needs. The working group was formed in 2005 to identify and act on opportunities to improve interoperability of geospatial data and services across these domains.

Activities:
The WG formally meets at quarterly OGC Technical Committee meetings and holds regular teleconferences. An email Listserv is used by WG members for communications as well as a robust collaboration space in the web-based OGC Portal.

Partners:
OGC and the National Institute for Building Sciences (NIBS) in the U.S. have a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to cooperate in areas of interest for the 3DIM WG. OGC also has an MoU with IAI International; Working Group participants are piloting the extension of IFC to enable richer geospatial descriptions (http://www.opengeospatial.org/pressroom/pressreleases/454). OGC and the Web3D Consortium have an MoU to work together to cooperatively advance standards to support web-based 3D visualization, modeling and simulation (http://www.opengeospatial.org/pressroom/pressreleases/650). OGC and the Special Interest Group (SIG) 3D have signed an MoU to cooperate in standards development and promotion of standards for the exchange and visualization of 3D geospatial content using Web-based technologies (http://lists.opengeospatial.org/pipermail/media/2011/000446.html). OGC also has a liaison with the W3C Point of Interest Working Group through several OGC staff members and OGC members participating in the group (http://www.w3.org/2010/POI).

Contacts:
Working Group Chair: Scott Simmons (CACI). Co-Vice Chairs: Carsten Roensdorf (Ordnance Survey) and Benjamin Hagedorn (U of Potsdam). Please direct inquiries for further information and opportunities for collaboration here: scsimmons at caci dot com.

The Architecture DWG considers overarching architectural issues that are germane to multiple OGC(r) specifications, including mechanisms for describing and invoking services in a heterogeneous distributed network. Chair: Doug Nebert (ddnebert [at] usgs [dot] gov), Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC).

Purpose

The purpose of the OGC Aviation DWG is to provide an open forum for work on aviation-related data interoperability and access, and a route to publication through OGC's standards ladder (Discussion paper / Best Practice / Standard, and, if appropriate, to ISO status). The open forum will encourage collaborative development among disparate participants in a rapidly evolving technological milieu, and will ensure appropriate liaisons to other working groups (inside and outside OGC).

Problem Statement

Many OGC (and ISO) standards are used in the Aviation world. Those include 

• GML - encoding standards for geospatial and technical data
• WFS - interface for hosting and accessing feature data
• WCS - interface for hosting and accessing gridded data (could include time-series)
• ISO 19115 - geospatial information - metadata (for datasets)
• ISO 19119 - geospatial information - metadata (for web services)
• Observations and Measurements (O&M)
• Binary-XML Encoding Specification

The Aviation community is quickly moving forward on the adoption of these standards. For example, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), EUROCONTROL and other organizations have jointly developed AIXM, which is based on GML 3.2, as a proposed standard for the representation and exchange of aeronautical information. Similarly, WXXM has been developed as a proposed standard for the exchange of aeronautical weather information in the context of a net-centric and global interoperable Air Transport System (ATS).

The core standards listed above move at different paces within OGC and are not necessarily always aligned with the requirements and priorities of the Aviation domain. Hence the Aviation community needs a single body within OGC that can focus on the coordination, alignment and profiling of these standards as well as the development of new ones (such as the Event Service) from the perspective of Aviation data producers, users and managers.

The Aviation perspective is unique because it involves

• Interconnected systems with many sources of information (aeronautical information publications, weather, NOTAMs, etc) and many users,
• Need for real-time information used for safety-critical purposes (e.g. flight planning, navigation, rerouting, etc),
• Right information at the right time at the right place to the right user (via a variety of Aviation clients ranging from avionic systems to Electronic Flight Bags (EFB)),
• End-to-end management of information
• Extreme variations in policy for the adoption and use of standards: civil, military, national and other organizational decision boundaries.

Aviation information is not only inherently spatial and complex, but is also constantly changing (AIXM for instance incorporates a temporality feature that allows for time-dependent changes affecting aeronautical features). Access, filtering and update of such temporally-oriented information can be challenging and poses new risks and requirements from the security, data integrity and reliability perspectives amongst others in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach.

A number of security issues are also important to consider in the context of aviation data management and applications:

• Integrity, Confidentiality and Authenticity aspects for AIXM/WXXM documents to ensure their protection in trusted and untrusted domains;
• Communication security to ensure protection of information (e.g. AIXM/WXXM) information;
• Authentication and Access Control to ensure that only authorized people can access the information;
• Audit and Alarms to ensure that the security functions of the system work "properly".

The Aviation DWG within OGC provides a venue to discuss all the above issues under a single umbrella in order to support (1) the representation and secure exchange of digital, consolidated, globally-interoperable aeronautical information and (2) the secure delivery of high-quality, real-time information needed to react efficiently in a dynamic airspace environment. As relationships between the various aviation service providers and policy makers becomes more dynamic with global implications, aviation domain experts must work in concert to maintain an up-to-date understanding of technology milestones, and their impact on the implementation of standards.

Activities

The WG formally meets at quarterly OGC Technical Committee meetings and holds regular teleconferences. An email Listserv is used by WG members for communications as well as a robust collaboration space in the web-based OGC Portal.

Contacts

Working Group Co-chairs: Hubert Lepori (Eurocontrol) and Diana Young (FAA)

Please direct inquiries for further information and opportunities for collaboration here: aviation-info [at] opengeospatial [dot] org (aviation-infoopengeospatial.org)

 

 

The Catalog Domain Working Group is responsible for collection of requirements, technology discussions, presentations, and other activities related to OGC work on interface specifications for Catalogs. Catalogs enable the collection, maintenance, and access of content and service metadata for the dynamic discovery of resources. The Catalog Working Group is also the forum for discussion, development, and approval of Profiles of the OpenGIS Catalog Specification.

The Coordinate Reference System (CRS) Domain Working Group develops strategies for encoding of earth coordinate reference systems and transformations between coordinate reference systems. Also addresses units of measure. The group has worked consistenty on the joint OGC-ISO Document 19111 - Spatial Referencing by Coordinates

The central purpose of the Coverages DWG is to promote and oversee development of OGC Implementation Specifications for exploitation of, and accessing, coverage data, including images and other grid coverages. Secondary purposes include promoting use of these specifications, and refining the OGC Abstract Specification as may be needed to better support these specifications.

These coverage services will support all aspects of image exploitation, including precision measurement of ground positions and of object dimensions in rectified and unrectified images and other coverages. Subclause 2.2 of OGC Abstract Specification Topic 15 “Image Exploitation Services” [OGC 00-115] contains a taxonomy of potentially useful image exploitation services, many of which also apply to exploiting other coverages. Such image exploitation increasingly supports decision support systems, often by bridging the gap between data and information.

Co-chairs: Peter Baumann (Jacobs University Bremen GmbH) and Stephan Meissl (EOX IT Services GmbH)

Purpose of the Data Preservation DWG

The purpose of the Data Preservation DWG is to provide a venue and mechanism for seeking technical and institutional solutions to the challenge of preserving digital geospatial data.

The charter of this Domain Working Group is to address technical and institutional challenges posed by data preservation, to interface with other OGC working groups that address technical areas that are affected by the data preservation problem, and to engage in outreach and communication with the preservation and archival information community.In particular, the WG will create and invite dialog with the broad spectrum of geospatial community and archival community constituents that have a stake in addressing data preservation issues.

In the course of fulfilling its Charter, the Data Preservation DWG will:

1.Develop communications materials, including white papers, a web site, and other documents that focus on the technical problem area of data preservation.

2.Manage a mailing list for discussion of domain-relevant issues within OGC.

3.Build relationships: engage members of the geospatial data community (including relevant OGC working groups) and the archival community.Foment and mediate communication within this target audience.

4.Conceive, design, coordinate, and implement demonstration, pilot, and production projects that demonstrate technical approaches to data preservation within the context of the OGC suite of technologies and relevant technologies emerging within the preservation and archiving community.

5.As appropriate, serve as a forum for the development of specification profiles and application schemas for archival purposes.

6.Engage the interest of sponsors for these activities.