OGC Requests

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) and the OpenMI Association (OA) have announced a call for public comment on the Open Modelling Interface Version 2 (OpenMI) and its accompanying reference manual. This standard defines a means by which independently developed computer models of environmental processes, or indeed any processes, can exchange data as they run and hence facilitates the modelling of interacting processes.

The original driver for the standard was the European Water Framework Directive and its requirement for an integrated approach to water management. It was foreseen that implementing the Directive would be very challenging and that there would be a need to provide help, in the form of decision support systems (DSS), to environmental managers. As Earth systems are complex and interrelated, these DSS would need to bring together many models in order to better understand and predict the environmental impacts of events and policies. To make it feasible to link together models of different processes from different suppliers and hence simulate process interaction, the European Commission therefore co-funded the research and development of a generic model interface, the outcome of which is the OpenMI.

Roger Moore, chairman of the OpenMI Association, said, “The OpenMI Association sees huge opportunities ahead for many stakeholder groups if the linking of models of different processes as they run can be made simple and reliable. Our immediate goal is to facilitate the integrated modelling needed to understand Earth system processes and hence help scientists, policy makers and managers find sustainable solutions to environmental challenges. By publishing the OpenMI as an adopted OGC standard, we seek to make the OpenMI standard available and accessible to the worldwide modelling community.”

Environmental modelling is not the only application of integrated modelling. For example, a possible shorter term application will simply be in enabling developers to convert their existing large, and often unmanageable, applications into sets of linkable components. This could change the modelling market from one for complete systems into one for components and services. It could make it much easier for products to be brought to market, widen participation and dramatically drive up the rate of innovation.

The documents being released for comment have been specially prepared so that the description of the OpenMI matches the OGC style. They can be viewed and downloaded

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announced a call for public comment on the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Coordinate Reference System (CRS) Extension Standard.

WCS defines an open standard interface to easily access multi-dimensional, spatio-temporal coverages, such as sensor data, satellite imagery, image time series, simulation data, point clouds, and meshes.

The OGC WCS CRS Extension defines an extension to the WCS Core that enables requests to specify that coverages be returned in one of a number of different Coordinate Reference Systems. While the WCS Core defines access only in the coverage’s Native CRS (i.e., the one in which the coverage is stored on the server), the WCS CRS Extension defines how to request and obtain a coverage in a CRS different from the Native CRS. This flexibility is important, for example, in exchanging data between different environments.

The OGC WCS CRS Extension is free and can be downloaded below:

The OGC WCS Standards Working Group will consider all comments when preparing a final draft of the candidate standard. The comment period ends 5 May 2013.

RFQ Issued Date: 14 February 2013
RFQ Written Comments due: 5pm EST on 21 February 2013
Proposals Due Date: 5pm EST on 4 March 2013

Go Directly to the Request for Quotation Document
Go Directly to the Request for Quotation Clarifications

Overview

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has issued a Request for Quotations/Call for Participation (RFQ/CFP) to solicit proposals in response to requirements for the OGC Geo4NIEM Project. The Geo4NIEM Initiative will result in recommendations to enhance the geospatial capabilities within the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM). Sponsors have identified specific Information Exchange Packages (IEPs) from Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Justice/Law Enforcement domain, and the Maritime domain as representative examples for investigation in this initiative.

The RFQ/CFP is available below. Deadline for submitting questions on the RFQ/CFP is 5pm EST on 21 February 2013. Responses are due by 5 pm EST on 4 March 2013.

The Point of Contact is Lew Leinenweber: techdesk [at] opengeospatial [dot] org (techdesk [at] opengeospatial [dot] org).

Geo4NIEM Initiative sponsors are:

• Program Manager – Information Sharing Environment (PM-ISE)
• National Information Exchange Model – Program Management Office (NIEM PMO)

The focus of Geo4NIEM project will be to address requirements in the context of the following information exchange domain areas:

Justice/Law Enforcement. The Justice/Law Enforcement domain in NIEM is defined by the Global Justice XML Data Model (Global JXDM). The Global Justice XML Data Model (Global JXDM) is an XML-based framework that enables the US justice and public safety communities to effectively share information at all levels.

Maritime Domain Awareness. The Maritime domain supports the effective understanding of anything associated with global maritime that could impact the United States' security, safety, economy, or environment. NIEM facilitates this understanding through effective, timely sharing of vital, secure information among many key partners by representing vessels, people, cargo, and maritime locations and activities.

The Geo4NIEM Project has been organized to address specific functional requirements to meet the following objectives:

• Develop recommendations for the inclusion and standard use of embedded GML with NIEM IEP documents (IEPDs).
• Develop recommendations for the standardized use of Naming and Design Rules and the use of adaptors (e.g. NIEM wrapper for GML).
• Test and demonstrate use of a standardized embedded GML and adaptors within NIEM IEPDs.
• Develop Architecture documentation and a fact sheet for the use of embedded GML and adaptors for use with NIEM IEPDs.
• Develop Recommendations for the inclusion of a Geospatial Domain within NIEM.

Click a link below to download individual files or a complete package for the RFQ/CFP.

DOWNLOAD RFP/CFP PACKAGE (as .zip archive)

Complete Geo4NIEM RFQ/CFP (pdf zip format)
Complete Geo4NIEM RFQ/CFP (doc zip format)

INDIVIDUAL FILES

Geo4NIEM RFQ Main Body (pdf)
Geo4NIEM RFQ Main Body (doc)
Geo4NIEM RFQ Annex A (pdf)
Geo4NIEM RFQ Annex A (doc)
Geo4NIEM RFQ Annex B (pdf)
Geo4NIEM RFQ Annex B (doc)

RFQ/CFP RESPONSE TEMPLATES (not included in above package)

Geo4NIEM RFQCFP Template Proposal (doc)
Geo4NIEM Template Spreadsheet (xls)

QUESTIONS:

Prospective bidders are invited to submit written questions by email regarding the RFQ to the OGC Technical Desk email address here: techdesk [at] opengeospatial [dot] org.

CLARIFICATIONS

Response to questions and any other clarifications are posted here:

• Clarifications

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has announced a Call for Participation (CFP) in the OGC MilOps Geospatial Interoperability Experiment (MOGIE). The CFP document is available below. 

Command and Control (C2) Core (https://c2core.gtri.org) has been an emerging data exchange capability within Department of Defense over the past three years.  DoD CIO is now moving toward adopting the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) (http://niem.gov). C2 Core, which is 93% aligned with NIEM technical standards, will be used as the foundation for developing a Military Operations (MilOps) Domain in NIEM. 

The purpose of this experiment is to ensure interoperability of the MilOps Domain with the OGC's geospatial standards and with tools built on those standards. This experiment will demonstrate that the MilOps Domain model and NIEM v2.1 technical concepts work in combination with OGC standards, such as the Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding Standard and the Web Feature Service (WFS) Web coverage Service (WCS) and Web Mapping Services (WMS) interface standards.

The OGC members that are acting as initiators of the Interoperability Experiment are:

• National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency  (NGA)
• MITRE
• Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) (http://www.gtri.gatech.edu)

Expressions of interest for participation are due by 4 March 2013.

Contact Frank Klucznik (Frank [dot] Klucznik [at] gtri [dot] gatech [dot] edu) for further details and to register as a participant.

Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is also one of the organizations that will be participating in the Interoperability Experiment. GTRI and other organizations planning to participate will develop tools, implement and deploy OGC service components or client applications, design a test plan, and prepare reports that contribute to the overall objectives of the experiment.

OGC testbeds, pilot projects and interoperability experiments are part of the OGC's Interoperability Program, a global, hands-on collaborative prototyping program designed to rapidly develop and test candidate specifications and then deliver these proven specifications into the OGC's Standards Program, where they are formalized for public release as OGC standards. These initiatives enable users and providers of geospatial technology to share the costs of developing standards that provide a foundation for "future-proof" enterprise architectures. Providers reduce their costs of developing and maintaining interfaces and encodings while gaining industry recognition, the confidence of an initiative's sponsoring organizations, and the market growth that results from open standards.

An OGC Interoperability Experiment is a rapid, low overhead, formally structured OGC-facilitated activity in which members achieve specific technical objectives that further the OGC Technical Baseline.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comments on the current draft of the candidate OGC GeoPackage (GPKG) Standard. The GPKG Standards Working Group will consider all comments when preparing a final draft of the candidate standard.

Mobile device users who require geospatial application services and associated data and who operate in disconnected or limited network connectivity environments frequently do not have open, available geospatial data to support their applications. Applications include such things as mobile workforce data capture and updates, volunteered geographic information, and real time annotations of map data in an emergency event.

The candidate OGC GeoPackage (GPKG) Standard provides an open, non-proprietary, platform-independent container for distribution and direct use of all kinds of geospatial data. The GeoPackage container and related API will increase the cross-platform interoperability of geospatial applications and web services in the mobile world.  Standard APIs for access and management of GeoPackage data will provide consistent query and update results across such applications and services.  

Future enhancements to the GeoPackage standard, a future GeoPackage Web Service standard, and modifications to existing OGC Web Service (OWS) standards to use GeoPackages as exchange formats will allow OWS to support provisioning of GeoPackages throughout an enterprise or information community.

Interoperability of GeoPackage implementations by several participants is being tested and will be demonstrated in the 15 January 2013 OGC Web Services Testbed (OWS-9) Demonstration. The current reference implementation bases, SQLite and SpatiaLite, are open source resources developed by OGC members. The SQLite reference implementation is sponsored in part by the SQLite Consortium, which includes a number of OGC members. SpatiaLite is built on OS-Geo open source libraries by the president of GFOSS.it and others.

The current draft of the candidate OGC GeoPackage (GPKG) Standard can be downloaded below:

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate OGC Augmented Reality Markup Language (ARML) 2.0 Encoding Standard.

ARML 2.0 provides an interchange format for Augmented Reality applications to describe and interact with objects in an AR scene, with a focus on mobile, vision-based AR. The candidate standard describes the virtual objects that are placed into an AR scene, as well as the registration of the virtual objects in the real world, and allows interaction with and dynamic modification of the AR scene using ECMAScript bindings.

ARML 2.0 emerged from ARML 1.0, developed by the creators of the Wikitude World Browser, and was completely remodeled within the OGC ARML 2.0 Standards Working Group to fit existing AR use cases.

The OGC ARML 2.0 Standards Working Group has set a specific focus on a generic way to describe Trackers in an Augmented Reality environment, allowing users to define a multitude of Trackers, such as Marker-Trackers, Face-Trackers, Natural Feature Trackers and even non-vision-based Trackers, to allow a multitude of AR use cases to be implemented with ARML 2.0. The deadline for comments is 2 December 2012.

The OGC ARML 2.0 Encoding Standard Evaluation Package is free and can be downloaded below.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate OGC SensorML 2.0 Encoding Standard.

SensorML is a machine-readable language for describing sensors, actuators, and processes surrounding measurement. SensorML is a key component of the OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) suite of standards.

SensorML 2.0 includes the following changes to the previous version 1.0.1, which was approved in 2007:

•  Separation of SWE Common Data as a separate standard
•  More tightly defined rules
•  Conformance classes allowing for incremental support of SensorML in software and derived encodings
•  A host of examples provided at initial release of the specification.

In addition, SensorML 2.0 includes the following new or improved features:

•  Support for property extension using external schema
•  Better-defined support for positions and dynamic state (e.g. location, orientation, velocity, and acceleration)
•  Better support for inheritance allowing for compact descriptions of deployed devices and processes
•  Direct access to real-time values and data streams
•  Better support for multiplexed data streaming (i.e. streams with disparate messages).

SensorML 2.0 supports the descriptions of things within the Internet of Things (IoT) and Web of Things (WoT) by providing a common standard for sensors ("things the measure"), actuators ("things that act"), and processors ("things that calculate"). Efforts are also underway to take advantage of the complementary role that SensorML 2.0 can play with the OGC City Geography Markup Language (CityGML) Encoding Standard and the candidate OGC standard IndoorGML.

The OGC SensorML 2.0 Encoding Standard Evaluation Package is free and can be downloaded below.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks comment on a GeoTIFF extension to the OGC GML Coverages (GMLCOV) 1.0 Standard and on a GeoTIFF extension to the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) 2.0 Standard, based on the former.

The OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding Standard is a widely used XML encoding for geospatial data of all types. OGC "coverages", which can be encoded in GML, associate positions within a bounded space to feature attribute values. Examples of these geospatial coverages include Earth images, referenced and non-referenced rasters, curvilinear grids, and point clouds.

The OGC GML 3.2.1 Application Schema – Coverages (GMLCOV), based on OGC Abstract Topic 6 (which is identical to ISO 19123), provides a unified method for encoding OGC coverages in GML, the OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) Common Standard, and the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Interface Standard. As GMLCOV is independent of a particular service definition, it allows coverage data to be exchanged through different types of services that implement these OGC standards.

To provide maximum flexibility in sharing coverage data, the GML Coverages GeoTIFF extension provides a way to encode coverages that are represented in encoding formats other than GML, such as GeoTIFF. The WCS 2.0 GeoTIFF extension binds the former extension to WCS 2.0 to allow usage of GeoTIFF encoded coverages with WCS. The OGC seeks public comment on the OGC documents describing the candidate GMLCOV and WCS extension standards for encoding GeoTIFF data in GMLCOV and using them with WCS. These documents are free and can be downloaded below.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate "GML-NIL profile" of the OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding standard. GML is a widely used XML grammar for encoding information about geographical features. The GML-NIL profile provides a way to allow data providers to make a best effort to supply data according to an application schema, even if they do not have values for all feature properties. This is achieved by marking the application schema as a whole as ‘nillable=true’ and using OGC ‘nil’ URIs in links for missing data. This reverses the usual pattern which has a default value of nillable=false.   

The GML-NIL pattern of use has been used informally for several years in Earth and environmental science applications, and this candidate standard merely aims to formalize and document the practice. It is expected to be useful in many applications where a heterogeneous community wishes to enable participation by a wide variety of members with different capabilities and data sources. The submission team is composed of members of the GeoSciML project.

The candidate OGC GML-NIL standard documents are available for review and comment below.