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@usgs.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-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.

 

The mission of the DQ DWG to establish a forum for describing an interoperable framework or model for OGC Quality Assurance measures and Web Services to enable access and sharing of high quality geospatial information, improve data analysis and ultimately influence policy decisions.

The WG will attempt to define a framework and a grammar for the certification and communication of spatial DQ. This method to describe and communicate data quality measures will reference, but not be limited by, a number of categories:

• Accuracy 
  • Positional accuracy
  • Temporal accuracy
  • Thematic accuracy
• Completeness
• Consistency and Integrity
• Definition (for semantic interoperability)
• Language
• Projection
• Scale 

Reference shall be made to the standards defined in ISO 19113, 19114, and 19138. ISO 19115 meta data standards are relevant in the storage of such measures and quality descriptors.

Co-chairs: Patrick Cunningham, Blue Marble Geographics. Matt Beare, 1Spatial.

The Decision Support DWG discusses requirements for interfaces necessary for interoperable service chaining (common expression and execution) in the areas of data mining, Integrated Client to access all OWS services and simulation. The DS DWG is currently reworking its mission to better reflect current OGC and IT best practices with regard to decision support.

Chair: Stan Tillman, Intergraph
Vice Chair: Ian Turton, Envitia

This group was officially created at the Edinburgh TC with:

• Co-chair, Chris Guthrie, NGA
• Co-chair, Lucio Coliacomo, EUSC
• Members including: Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems, DGIWG, EUSC,ESRI, Galdos Systems, University of Alabama Huntsville, NGA, Intergraph, TechniGraphics

The objectives of the DIDWG are to:

·         Provide an environment that facilitates information exchange and collaboration between all members;

·         Collect and express the business and technical requirements for geospatial interoperability by the community in a manner suitable for industry;

·         Receive feedback from industry on the business and technical requirements;

·         Present and review geospatial standards that are profiled for the community;

·         Present and review commercial software solutions directed at the community;

·         Present and review compliance test procedures pertinent to the community;

·         Provide feedback to industry on commercial software solutions;

·         Recommend the formation of OGC pilot projects and test beds that serve the community requirements;

·         Facilitate the creation of special communities of interest, within the DIDWG, promoting new initiatives within the DIDWG.

·         Promote the DWG to members of the community to encourage their participation;

·         Publish the outcomes of DWG activities on the OGC Web site;

·         Undertake liaison relationships between the DWG and groups that represent the interests of the DI community;

·         Manage the DWG as a community of practice where all members can participate independently of formal structures and processes that individual organizations may otherwise impose.

The Earth Systems Science (ESS) DWG engages in outreach and dialog with the Natural Resources and Environment information community to demonstrate the value of OGC processes and standards, and to provide a point of input for new requirements.

Current focus of the group includes:

• Enhanced Collaboration between and among research and scientific communities
• Sustainable Development
• Discussion and vetting of Application Schemas for Natural Resources and Environment
• Outreach to, and communication with, other individuals and organizations in the NRE information community

The ESS WG has a mailing list, available to OGC members.

Additional tools include:

• A Public TWiki site, for collaboration with organizations and individuals who are not yet OGC members, and
• An Internal TWiki site, for discussion of standards or other materials not yet available to the general public.

This was formally known as the NRE.WG.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Purpose:

The purpose of the EDM DWG is to promote and support the establishment of requirements and best practices for web service interfaces, models and schemas for enabling the discovery, access, sharing, analysis, visualization and processing of information to the forecasting, prevention, response to and recovery from emergency and disaster situations.

Mission:

The mission of the EDM DWG is to improve efficiency and effectiveness of users in all phases of emergency and disaster activities communities through changes and extensions to OpenGIS® specifications which result in interoperable geospatial products and other information consumables that can be shared across these communities.

Objectives and Key Activities:

The EDM DWG provides a forum for uniting communities of users including government agencies, industry, research organizations, Non government organizations and others in various phases of emergency and disaster activities. The EDM DWG will:

• Invite discussion of interoperability and standards requirements, use cases and related input from organizations involved in EDM. Example topics include but are not limited to:
  • Addressing a range of events, from small to large scale.
  • Involving limited or denied communications environments.
  • Limited “time to deploy” inherent in Emergency and Disaster event operations.
  • Trans-border events, such as nuclear accidents and pollutant dispersion, involving international and a variety of national institutions.
  • Assessment of institutional policy and practices as drivers for standards assessment, development, testing, validation and demonstration.
  • Consideration of changing technology and social trends, such as the impact of social networking, crowd sourcing and other mass market trends.
• Evaluate input with respect to existing standards and architecture (including the OpenGIS Reference Model)
• Identify interoperability standards gaps and opportunities to support improved EMDR information sharing, collaboration and decision making.  
• Work closely with other OGC Technical Committee activities as necessary to define requirements and coordinate standards development and maintenance related to EDM objectives. 
• Develop new requirements and change requests for consideration by OGC membership, and/or by other Standards Development Organizations ’s as appropriate
• Propose or encourage initiation of Interoperability Program studies, experiments, pilot initiatives, testbed threads or demonstrations to address technical, institutional and policy related interoperability challenges, and identify and engage the interest of potential sponsors for these activities.
• Coordinate with relevant OGC Alliance Partner organizations to identify requirements, advance standards and promote best practices.
• Support outreach opportunities to include event participation, articles, etc.  to communicate the benefits of OGC standards, and to support and assist the user community with the adoption of OGC standards and best practices related to EDM

Chairs and Co-chairs: Jaci Knudson, Ingo Simonis, Jimmy Chou

The Energy & Utilities Domain Working Group will focus on the global energy and utilities community, which is defined as individuals and organizations engaged in the geospatial aspects of the planning, delivery, operations, reliability and ongoing management of electric, gas, oil and water services throughout the world.

The Energy & Utilities DWG will facilitate information exchange and collaboration between agencies and industry by focusing on the engagement of industry within this community. The intent is to define requirements and use cases to drive the development of changes and/or enhancements to existing OGC standards and to develop new OGC standards that meet the needs of stakeholders.  There are a significant number of other organizations tasked with defining and coordinating standards development and solving interoperability issues within the “Smart Grid” community, including NIST (USA) and NIST’s Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP), the European Union (EU) Smart Grid Coordination Group (SG-CG), IEEE, and IEC. (See also press release about NIST and SG-CG alliance.) Therefore, another objective of this group is to coordinate opportunities identified as gaps or overlaps from a broader industry perspective and to collaborate with other standards development organizations internationally as required.

Outside of the energy and utility industry, new users of geospatial information and standards are emerging. For example, municipalities and their collaborators could benefit from access to authoritative geospatial data for community energy and emissions inventory and model development purposes. Utilities can achieve operational efficiencies in responding to such requests, by standardizing the way in which data or other information products are made available in a way that protects customer privacy and commercial interests

The primary goals of the Energy & Utilities DWG are to:

• Provide value to market participants within the domain working group as a clearinghouse for the identification of overlaps and gaps in geospatially oriented data  across the large volume of standards organizations.

• Cultivate technical solutions which support interoperable concepts, data definitions, formats and services for publishing, search, and exchange of geospatial information.

• Identify and work with a representative group of market participants in the identification and prioritization of use cases that will provide the most significant value, or mitigate the most significant risks in this arena.

• Initiate demonstration projects to develop and publicize best practices in this area.

• Establish a workable approach to the ongoing identification of gaps and overlaps in industry standards as market design continues. 

 

The objectives of the Energy & Utilities DWG to meet these goals are to:

• Collect and express the business and technical requirements for geospatial interoperability by the community in a manner suitable for industry;

• Receive feedback from industry on the business and technical requirements;

• Present and review geospatial standards that are profiled for the community;

• Promote the value of participation in the collaborative environment OGC provides for all stakeholders involved in geospatially oriented data in the energy and utility industry;

• As with all OGC working groups, ensure protection of stakeholders' Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) throughout the standards life cycle;

• Promote periodic vendor review and update of OGC’s inventory of vendor compliance with those OGC standards relevant to this community

• Present and review compliance test procedures pertinent to the community;

• Recommend the formation of OGC pilot projects and test beds that serve the community requirements;

• Facilitate the creation of special communities of interest, within the E&U DWG, promoting new initiatives within the E&U DWG;

• Undertake liaison relationships between the DWG and other groups that represent the interests of the E&U community;

• Identify opportunities for public collaboration and coordinate those efforts.

 

NOTE: This group was formerly the Geospatial Digital Rights Management (GeoDRM) Working Group.

 

Mission

A great deal of work has been done in the area of data ownership and rights management. This work is of interest to the Geospatial community in that many geospatial data providers need to manage or control who has access to their data and how it is used. The lack of a Geospatial Rights Management (GeoRM) capability is a major barrier to broader adoption of Web based geospatial technologies. The mission of the GeoRM Domain Working Group is to coordinate and mature the development and validation of work being done on digital rights management for the geospatial community.

The GeoRM DWG has developed the Geospatial Digital Rights Management Reference Model (GeoDRM RM), an abstract specification for the management of digital rights in the area of geospatial data and services. This document has been approved by the OGC membership, who will use the GeoDRM RM in developing OpenGIS Implementation Specifications for open interfaces and encodings that will enable SDI and diverse systems to participate in transactions involving data, services and intellectual property protection.

Background and Problem Statement

As geographic content (geodata) and services become more widely available in digital form over ubiquitous networks, data becomes easier to distribute, share, copy and alter. While this is generally a good thing, many organizations involved in the production and trading of geodata find the need to manage their Intellectual Property (IP) assets through the digital distribution value chain. Organizations want to specify, manage, control and track geodata distribution within open, secure and trusted environments. A system of operating agreements and interoperable technologies is needed to enable broader distribution and use of geodata while managing the rights of producers and users. Also, users need such a system if they are to have concrete terms-of-use that reduce their legal risks.

In e-commerce models for dissemination and use of Intellectual Property (IP) assets, geodata are treated as commodities to be priced, ordered, traded and licensed. Direct monetary reward, however, is often not the motivation or is only secondary behind the desire for more rigorous control of IP assets. Harlan Onsrud of the GeoData Alliance argues that the incentive structures implicit in "library systems" are an appropriate model for motivating data producers, collectors and traders to document, share and otherwise disseminate their geodata. Onsrud observes that the library system is a "chaordic" framework of seemingly ad hoc agreements among stakeholders that strikes a balance supporting "...strong public goods, access and equity principles while fully protecting the intellectual property rights of authors and publishers.[1]

Rapid technological advances have tipped the balance of laws that establish incentives for producers to make their content available while maintaining the access, use and equity rights of users. Onsrud envisions the establishment of a framework of operating agreements, similar to that in which libraries develop and share resources, as one way to establish a way for geodata to be more accessible and useful to a larger numbers of users.

The specific requirements for managing IP rights by controlling geodata distribution and use, however, are extremely complex and vary widely depending heavily on factors such as:

• The "business" of the organization (i.e., the motivations of commercial, public-sector, and academic organizations to make their geodata available)
• The type of data and media formats (e.g., physical, electronic, text, graphic, audio, video, vector, raster, observation, etc.)
• The content distribution channels (e.g., size of content, network bandwidth, types of end devices)
• The types and granularity of intellectual property rights to be managed and the contractual obligations for its use (e.g., unlimited distribution, license to use, license to reuse parts, limited distribution, sensitive/classified, etc).

Just as the requirements vary, so does the enabling technology. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a popular term for a field that emerged in the mid-1990s when content providers, technology firms and policymakers began to confront the imbalance of technology and laws caused by the effect of ubiquitous computer networks on the distribution of copyrighted material in digital form. DRM is about creating, packaging, distributing, controlling and tracking content based on rights and licensing information. DRM is closely integrated with Content Management System (CMS) technology for creating metadata, storing and organizing digital content in support of workflow, search, browse, access and retrieval processes by users in workgroups, enterprises and information communities. It is also dependent on Information Security technologies to provide the trusted infrastructure for DRM and E-commerce to address the financial transactions necessary to procure rights to geospatial content.

Objectives

The objectives for the GeoRM Domain Working Group are:

• Enable business models for web-based geospatial services and SDI by identifying or developing a trusted infrastructure for purchasing, managing and protecting rights to digital content.
• Guide the development of OGC specifications and best practices recommendations to permit the exploitation of mainstream DRM approaches, technologies and standards wherever possible
• Test, verify and mature as necessary the technologies required for geospatial DRM including electronic commerce and information security.
• Develop specifications for geospatial DRM that build on the OGC technical baseline.

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[1] Harlan Onsrud, "Exploring the Library Metaphor in Developing a More Inclusive NSDI." http://www.geoall.net/library_harlanonsrud.html

The GeoBI Ad Hoc has been renamed to GeoBI DWG upon approval during the December 2011 TC/PC meetings.

Business intelligence (BI) aims to support better business decision-making using computer-based techniques used for identifying, extracting and analyzing business data. Geospatial Business Intelligence (GeoBI) adds geospatial technology to BI.

The Gartner report "The Consumerization of BI Drives Greater Adoption" notes the concept of a single enterprisewide BI product standard is flawed and organisations need to oversee a number of BI platform components. This finding points directly to the key role of standards development in helping BI achieve its full potential and market adoption.

This working group seeks to define an agenda for OGC to promote the uptake of standards-based GeoBI throughout the BI industry.

All members have visibility to this project, however, if you wish to join the email reflector and have access to upload documents, etc, you will need to join the group as a Group Member, by clicking here.

Chair: Ron Lake, Galdos.  Vice Chair: Clemens Portele, Interactive Instruments

Geography Markup Language is an XML grammar written in XML Schema for the modelling, transport, and storage of geographic information. The key concepts used by Geography Markup Language (GML) to model the world are drawn from the OGC Abstract Specification (available online: http://www.opengeospatial.org/techno/abstract.htm. GML provides a variety of kinds of objects for describing geography including features, coordinate reference systems, geometry, topology, time, units of measure and generalized values. A geographic feature is "an abstraction of a real world phenomenon; it is a geographic feature if it is associated with a location relative to the Earth”. So a digital representation of the real world can be thought of as a set of features. The state of a feature is defined by a set of properties, where each property can be thought of as a {name, type, value} triple. The number of properties a feature may have, together with their names and types, are determined by its type definition. Geographic features with geometry are those with properties that may be geometry-valued. A feature collection is a collection of features that can itself be regarded as a feature; as a consequence a feature collection has a feature type and thus may have distinct properties of its own, in addition to the features it contains. Geographic features in GML include coverages and observations as subtypes. A coverage is a sub-type of feature that has a coverage function with a spatial domain and a value set range of homogeneous 2 to n dimensional tuples. A coverage can represent one feature or a collection of features “to model and make visible spatial relationships between, and the spatial distribution of, earth phenomena.” An observation models the act of observing, often with a camera, a person or some form of instrument (“an act of recognizing and noting a fact or occurrence often involving measurement with instruments”). An observation is considered to be a GML feature with a time at which the observation took place, and with a value for the observation. A reference system provides a scale of measurement for assigning values “to a location, time or other descriptive quantity or quality”. A coordinate reference system consists of a set of coordinate system axes that is related to the earth through a datum that defines the size and shape of the earth. Geometries in GML indicate the coordinate reference system in which their measurements have been made. The “parent” geometry element of a geometric complex or geometric aggregate makes this indication for its constituent geometries. A temporal reference system provides standard units for measuring time and describing temporal length or duration. Following ISO 8601, the Gregorian calendar with UTC is used in GML as the default temporal reference system. A Units of Measure (UOM) dictionary provides definitions of numerical measures of physical quantities, such as length, temperature, and pressure, and of conversions between UOMs

This is the Homepage for the OGC's Geometry Domain Working Group. The only activity currently under way is a new draft of ISO 19107: Spatial schema. This will undoubtedly expand into other groups, but the project will keep its files (for drafts and change requests) here. Anyone wishing to keep a watch on ths process is encouraged to use the watch functionality of the portal to do so.

The scope of the Geosemantics DWG is any aspect of conceptual modeling and formal representation of geospatial knowledge which advances the the geospatial interoperability mission of OGC. A particular focus will be the adoption or development of tools and methods in support of these activities.

It is the mission of the Geosemantics DWG to establish an interoperable and actionable semantic framework for representing the geospatial knowledge domains of information communities as well as mediating between them.

The Hydrology Domain Working Group is a Joint Working Group of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the OGC

The purpose of the Hydrology DWG is to provide a venue and mechanism for seeking technical and institutional solutions to the challenge of describing and exchanging data describing the state and location of water resources, both above and below the ground surface. The path to adoption will be through OGC papers and standards, advanced to ISO where appropriate, and also through the World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) and it's Commission for Hydrology (CHy) and Information Systems (WIS) activities.

While CHy has the recognized mandate to publish and promote standards in this area, OGC contributes to the process with its resources and experience in guiding collaborative development among disparate participants in a rapidly evolving technological environment. The OGC Hydrology DWG will provide a means of developing candidate standards for adoption by CHy as appropriate.

The Hydro DWG isopen to both member and non member participation and is intended to be a public forum for communication, and both the email list and the wiki are open to interested parties.

Co:Chairs: David Lemon (CSIRO), Ilya Zaslavsky (SDSC) and Ulrich Looser (GRDC)

1.    Key Activities.
The DWG will focus on the following activities:
1.    Reviewing the current LandXML schema and determining how best to continue to support the existing users and engage with them.
2.    Assessing the current industry support for the LandXML schema and whether multiple, incompatible versions of the schema have evolved.
3.    Investigating how to best incorporate LandXML into the OGC standards framework, including identifying places where there may be common elements in existing standards such as CityGML.
4.    Investigating the possibility of moving the LandXML schema into LandGML.
5.    Other efforts to integrate land information contained in various CAD formats into the OGC standards framework.

2.    Business Case
The LandXML community consists of over 650 organizations with 750 members in over 40 countries. There are over 70 registered software products that supported LandXML as of 2009.

A need exists for an organization like the OGC to assume the management of the LandXML schema and leverage the work that has been done over almost 10 years in developing the user community. This community is currently unsupported and not able to make complete use of the potential benefits that can come from active support of the schema and integration with other related OGC standards.

By the OGC adopting the LandXML schema, the user community will be assured of a formal process for maintaining, improving, documenting and in fact, formalizing the standard. This will lead to new opportunities for integration with other related OGC standards.

There will likely be other opportunities where CAD-based land information can be incorporated into the OGC standards framework as the process proceeds.

3.    Organizational Approach and Scope of Work
3.1    Land Development DWG Business Goals
The Land Development DWG will need to establish a set of business goals that frame the basis for determining the nature and type of recommendations made to OGC, framed around the above mentioned business issues.  Examples of the types of discussion for framing goals include
1)    Efforts should focus on working land information issues and problems that result in a net gain for the community.
2)    Minimize technical distinctions between land information data processing systems that use geography, as this can lead to artificial barriers that limit the potential of all segments of the information community to come together and fully prosper.
3)    Avoid placing artificial technical barriers on use of land information data.
4)    Establish the means by which OGC can achieve interoperability and yet preserve the proprietary nature of data.
5)    Define the supporting infrastructure for the community to achieve these goals.
3.2    Land Development: Mission and Role
The mission of the Land Development DWG is to determine the best approach for the OGC to become the standards organization responsible for the LandXML data schema. Our role is to explore the potential options and determine the most appropriate method for supporting LandXML data types within the OGC data standards framework, as well as other land information that is currently not integrated with this framework.
3.3    Activities planned for Land Development
The Land Development DWG has the following activities planned:
1.    Assess the feasibility of moving the LandXML Schema into LandGML.
2.    Engage the existing LandXML user community to identify current satisfaction with the schema and to understand desired enhancements.
3.    Develop a demonstration project to test the proposed strategy.
4.    Research and identify other opportunities for better integration of land information within the OGC standards framework.
5.    Identify and report places where there may be overlap of content with other standards, such as CityGML and propose mechanisms to insure lossless exchange of data where appropriate.
6.    If successful, develop a plan for working with the LandXML user community to obtain their input and support for the new standard."

OGC standards development process have depended upon communities of interest working to advance standards for improved information sharing, situational awareness and decision making.  OGC’s working group activities, testbeds and pilot initiatives will benefit from being driven by requirements and use cases provided by representatives from the law enforcement, civil security and public safety communities. 

Criminal acts and crises events have no boundaries, yet manifest themselves locally.  The ability to keep citizenry safe, prevent crime, and protect against acts of terror, widely depends on the ability to acquire relevent data, rapidly share appropriate data, analyze the information at hand, and make smart operational decisions.  Turning seemingly disparate data into actionable intelligence, through the  ‘intelligence life-cycle’ of planning, direction, collection, processing/exploitation, analysis/production, and dissemenation depends on geospatial and temporal correlation. Along with proper training and equipment, being ‘armed’ with location based situational awareness is what assures timely safety and security measures are taken.  

Law enforcement, civil security and public safety applications include the data, networks, web services that tie together levels of command, departments, organizations, dispatch users and field mobile users with current and accurate role-based location information.  Benchmarks from some urban law enforcement organizations indicate that geospatially enabled policing yields valuable improvements.  For example, geospatial analysis has helped law enforcement implement ‘hot spot’ policing for over 20 years.  Identifying high concentrations of crime in small geographic areas facilitates effective prevention and enforcement strategies that have proven to reduce crime.  

Open standards compliant GIS Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) products are rapidly evolving to leverage virtualized and mobile computing environments and provide location based services.  These interoperable geospatial technologies when extended to fill some key gaps and applied in a holistic manner - with ease of integrated use in mind - have the potential to dramatically improve the law enforcement, civil security and public safety domain effectiveness and efficiency.  The Open Geospatial Consortium’s Open Web Services (OWS) interoperability test beds, when guided by a proactive Domain Working Group will be a practical method to coalesce GIS COTS vendors, solutions integrators, research organizations and government sponsors and make coherent strides in end-to-end capabilities and associated deployment and usage best practices. With the right mission experienced people as active participants, the LEAPS DWG will understand that it is imperative that future technology solutions are designed to support operational workflow and the public safety mission.

The Abu Dhabi Police joined the Open Geospatial Consortium as a Principal Member in order to lead a domain working group that will be supported by law enforcement, civil security and public safety forces from UAE, the Middle East region and other world regions. The Abu Dhabi Police have collaborated with North American, European and Asian law enforcement, civil security and public safety forces for many years.  Thus, the Abu Dhabi Police is ideally positioned to provide connection to the Middle East region as broader international community, as well as being able to promote participation and adoption of open standards development throughout the community of practice.  The Abu Dhabi Police will lead this open consensus based community of practice to co-evolve geospatially enabled best practices through a proactive Law Enforcement and Public Safety (LEAPS) domain working group (DWG).

Geospatial information and techologies along with OGC and complimentary open standards are being increasingly leveraged in major research and operational programs involved in emergency and disaster planning, early warning, prevention, response and recovery.  

 

2.1   Purpose

The purpose of the LEAPS DWG is to promote and support the establishment of local, national, regional and international requirements and best practices for web service interfaces, data models and schemas for enabling the discovery, access, sharing, analysis, visualization and processing of information.  This geospatially and temporally correlated information will be used to comprehensively address crime, terrorist activities and public safety incidents in an operationally effective way.

The scope of work for the LEAPS DWG will span all phases of GIS enabled law enforcement, civil security and public safety activities.

3.1   Mission

The mission of the LEAPS DWG is to drive open geospatial standards, interoperable geospatial products and best implementation practices that support improved decision making and operational efficiencies for all echelons of law enforcement, civil security and public safety community of users.

3.2   Objectives and Key Activities

The LEAPS DWG provides a unifying forum for local, National, regional and international law enforcement, civil security and public safety forces along with associated industry, academic and research organizations to collaboratively support the maturation of new ways to plan, think and operate with geospatial enablement.   The LEAPS DWG will:

• Establish LEAPS community business outcomes and associated key performance indicators to derive LEAPS DWG goals and progress measurements
• Identify LEAPS community interoperability and standards requirements, use cases, data models and related geospatial standards gaps such as:
  • The ability to distribute individual data sets and/or collections of data sets in a secure, consistent and accurate manner – including the use of locations and geometries in role based access control
  • The ability to execute time sensitive geodataset transfers over disadvantaged and,  at times, disconnected networks to and from mobile users
  • The ability to support temporal queries of changing geodatasets.
  • The ability to support web services and client applications involving synchronization and updates of geospatial data across a hierarchical Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI)
  • Streamlined validation scenarios, bootstrap database creation and population, and defined query based subscription mechanisms
  • The ability to share analytical tools and tradecraft across communities of practice
• Drive LEAPS domain requirements, use cases and data models into OGC testbeds and pilot initiatives
• Foster LEAPS domain specific collaboration between multi-national Governments, Industry, Academia and Research Organizations
• Harmonize common geospatial practices and LEAPS mission specific vocabularies
• Reach out and educate communities of users and geospatial technology providers with LEAPS domain best practices

 

4.1   Membership

The LEAPS DWG will be open to any OGC member at any time, in accordance with the OGC Policies and Procedures. The LEAPS DWG also seeks to be inclusive of all organisations and groups with a desire to contribute to the goal of interoperability within the chartered mission of this DWG. The LEAPS DWG will encourage regular interaction with representatives of the the broad community of law enforcement, civil security and public safety stakeholders.

4.2 Governance

The LEAPS DWG shall be governed in accordance with OGC Technical Committee Policies and Procedures. 

The LEAPS DWG will provide a forum for the discussion, prioritization and advancement of open standards solutions to benefit the LEAPS community.  It will also serve as a platform for outreach and education to help increase awareness of the value of OGC standards based enterprise solutions in the LEAPS community.   This will accelerate the acceptance and uptake of OGC standards in the LEAPS communities for improved interoperability, data sharing and decision making.

Development in leading edge technology is expensive and resource consuming and therefore need to only focus on gaps that need to be filled in order to fully leverage the extensive set of GIS COTS and Internet Infrastructure and their on-going technology advances. The current speed of technological advancement makes it virtually impossible for any individual organization to keep up. An OGC Forum presents an opportunity to both Government and the private sector to increase collaboration and sharing of resources to drive LEAPS domain innovation and while reducing life cycle costs.

 

The Location Services Domain Working Group addresses interoperability issues of particular concern to members working in the area of Location-based Mobile Services.

The mission of the Mass Market Domain Working Group is to broaden the use of location-aware technologies in mainstream consumer and business IT infrastructures.

This working group has two broad goals. The first is to understand the implementation barriers for these interest groups and document them in a format that can guide future technology design. Second, the group will define a suite of services and information encodings that complement the existing OGC specifications, but are directly tailored to the requirements discovered in understanding the needs of the mass market.

This is the public home page for the Mass Market Domain Working Group. This group was established at the December 2006 OGC TC/PC Meetings.

The OGC working group is open to non-OGC member participation. OGC members and the public can join the discussion list here:

https://lists.opengeospatial.org/mailman/listinfo/mass-market-geo

Discusion currently centers on the following topics:

• Modern digital maps: KML, OWS Context, etc.
• GeoRSS
• Geo in relation to Web 2.0
• Mobile Internet

The Metadata DWG addresses issues related to how metadata must be specified in OpenGIS Specifications to fully enable certain services in the OpenGIS Service Architecture. Maintains close correspondence between ISO TC/211 metadata standard and OpenGIS Specification's handling of metadata.

The Meteorology & Oceanography Domain Working Group was established at the OGC Athens Technical Conference, 2009-03-31, to ensure that OGC standards and profiles allow the meteorological community to develop effective interoperability for web services and content across the wider geospatial domain.

The ability to easily exchange atmospheric meteorological and climatological information in a timely and useful fashion is becoming increasingly important.  Further, oceanographic data is increasingly exchanged in near real time for operational purposes as well as through the more traditional research campaigns. Oceanographic data is used to force atmospheric models, for both weather forecasting and climate prediction, and to explicitly model the oceans, seas, tides, waves and swell.

Meteorological and oceanographic data, in general, are/is multidimensional, continually evolving, highly spatial and highly temporal in nature.
This Meteorology and Oceanography Domain Working Group brings together OGC members in an open forum to work on oceanographic, meteorological and climatological data, metadata, and web services interoperability, greatly improving the way in which this information is described, shared and used.

Meteorology and Oceanography have a long history of shared approaches and institutions, so a joint Domain Working Group is very natural.

This working group is hosted by the OGC and co-chaired by a representative from the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) Commission for Basic Systems (CBS).

The Met Ocean DWG is open to participation by both non-members and members and is intended to be a public forum for communication, and both the mailing list and the group Twiki are open to interested parties.

The group Twiki and mailing list are available to all interested parties.

Chair: Chris Little (UK Met Office), Co-Chair: Marie-Francoise Voidrot (Météo-France)

The purpose of the Oblique Imagery Domain Working Group (OIDWG) is to identify and utilize Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards, data and services, as well as standards from any other SDO to identify gaps and overlaps in the use of oblique imagery data and associated services. The primary focus of OIDWG is to identify and/or develop data and service standards that will improve interoperability of oblique image processing, transformation, mensuration, and analysis.  The OIDWG will also review the types of ISR assets used in the capture of oblique imagery.

Mission

It is the mission of the Security DWG to establish an interoperable security framework for OpenGIS Web Services to enable protected geospatial information processing.

Background and Problem Statement

Current specifications of the OGC do not include security related aspects. In order to enable protected geospatial information processing and licensing, it is relevant to describe how to handle security related aspects in an interoperable way. This can be achieved by leveraging existing IT-standards.

Objectives

The objectives of this Domain Working Group are:

• Authentication (proof of identification) as it is a requirement for establishing Access Control and the Licensing of geospatial information.
• Access Control as it regulates the availability of geospatial data, mainly available online.
• Use of encryption to protect
  • the communication establishing reliable mechanisms for business partners to exchange information,
  • the geodata in the licensing scenario from being used without appropriate rights, as stated in a license and
  • the license.
• It is not the intention of the Security Domain Working Group to be responsible for all security related aspects that have not been listed as an objective.

Chair

 Andreas Matheus, University of the Bundeswehr - ITIS ,  Andreas.Matheus@UniBW.de