OGC Request

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate OGC WaterML 2.0: part 1 – Time Series Encoding Standard.

WaterML 2.0 is a candidate Open Geospatial Consortium standard for the representation of hydrological observations, specifically addressing time series data. The WaterML 2.0 candidate standard is implemented as an application schema of the OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding Standard version 3.2.1 and makes use of the OGC Observations and Measurements (O&M) model and encoding standards.

The OGC WaterML 2.0 candidate standard supports encoding of hydrological and hydrogeological observation data in exchange scenarios such as: exchange of data for operational monitoring and forecasting programs; supporting operation of infrastructure (e.g. dams, supply systems); exchange of observational and forecast data for surface water and groundwater; release of data for public dissemination; enhancing disaster management through data exchange; and exchange in support of national reporting.

WaterML 2.0 is the result of an international cooperative effort of the OGC Hydrology Domain Working Group, involving hydrological and government agencies, software providers, universities and research organizations from Australia, the USA, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and other countries.

The candidate OGC WaterML Version 2.0 standard documents are available for public review and comment below:

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate OGC GeoSynchronization Best Practices Document.

Frequently, geospatial content providers must collaborate with outside entities to collect new data and/or update their existing data holdings. This may be the case, for example, when municipal, state/provincial and/or federal agencies synchronize their data with closest-to-source providers. Another case is when content providers are crowdsourcing (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing) elements of their data production or supporting volunteer geographic information (VGI).

This candidate OGC Best Practice describes how to use the OGC's open interface and encoding standards to implement services that mediate interaction between geospatial data providers, the content repositories, and the external entities acting as data collectors. Such services support data entry with validation, notification of changes to interested parties and replication of the data content submitted to multiple repositories.

This document defines an OGC Best Practice on a particular technology or approach related to OGC standards. This document is not an OGC standard and may not be referred to as an OGC standard. It is subject to change without notice. However, this document is an official position of the OGC membership on this particular technology topic.

The following organizations submitted this Best Practice to the OGC: The Carbon Project, OpenGeo.org and CubeWerx Inc.

The candidate OGC GeoSynchronization Best Practices document is available for public review and comment below.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate OGC Gazetteer Best Practices Document.

There is growing interest in the development of a common feature-based model for geographic names databases, often referred to as gazetteers. This candidate OGC best practice describes the Gazetteer Service Application Profile of the OGC Web Feature Service Interface Standard.

This document is an OGC Best Practice on a particular technology or approach related to the use of OGC standards. 

The following organizations submitted this Best Practice to the OGC:

• CubeWerx Inc.
• Intergraph Government Solutions
• The Carbon Project
• US Army Corps of Engineers Army Geospatial Center (AGC)
• US Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC)
• US Geological Survey (USGS)
• US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)

The candidate OGC Gazetteer Best Practices Document is available for public review and comment below:

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on Version 1.1 of the OGC City Geography Markup Language (CityGML) Encoding Standard (http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/citygml).

CityGML is an open information model and XML-based encoding for the representation, storage, and exchange of virtual 3D city models. It provides a way to describe objects with respect to their geometry, topology, semantics and appearance, and it defines five different levels of detail. CityGML allows users to employ virtual 3D city models for sophisticated analysis and display tasks in different application domains such as pedestrian navigation, environmental simulations, urban data mining, facilities management, real estate appraisal, and location based marketing.

CityGML has been implemented in many software solutions and is in use in many projects around the world. Developed for Urban Information Modeling applications, CityGML plays an important role in bridging Urban Information Models with Building Information Models (BIM) to improve interoperability among the information systems used in the many areas of activity that involve design, construction, ownership and operation of buildings and capital projects.

CityGML is implemented as an application schema of the OGC Geography Markup Language 3 (GML3) Encoding Standard (http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/gml), an international standard for spatial data exchange and encoding approved by the OGC and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

The current version 1.0 of CityGML was adopted as an official OGC Standard in August 2008 and has come to wide use since then. The OGC Technical Committee's CityGML Working Group has received input from the wider community in the form of change requests, proposed additions and suggestions. With this guidance, the Working Group developed the draft CityGML Version 1.1, a minor revision of the current CityGML version 1.0 that maintains backwards compatibility with version 1.0. Version 1.1 includes new thematic modules for tunnels and bridges, the ability to model footprint and roof edge representations for buildings in the coarsest level of detail, and generic attribute sets, as well as a number of additional properties and other enhancements.

 The candidate CityGML Version 1.1 standard documents are available for review and comment below. Comments are due by 14 September 2011.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate Earth Observation profile for the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) 2.0 standard. This profile will facilitate on-line data access to Earth Observation data products.

The OGC WCS 2.0 standard defines a general interface and operations that enable interoperable access to geospatial coverages, such as sensor data, satellite imagery, digital elevation models, and climate/ocean data. The candidate OGC Web Coverage Service Application Profile for Earth Observation products (EO-WCS) defines an interface for interoperable access to Earth Observation data.

The rapid increase of computer power and network accessibility, along with implementations of the OGC WCS standard, make it possible for applications to deliver user selected sensor, image, and statistics data, including human modifications of the Earth's surface and atmosphere. As use of the standard increases, an increasingly wide variety of data will conveniently be brought together in applications such as environment, natural resources, planning, disaster management and public security.

The candidate Earth Observation profile for the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) 2.0 standard documents are available for review and comment below.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate OGC “GeoSPARQL: A Geographic Query Language for RDF Data” Standard. The candidate OGC GeoSPARQL standard defines spatial extensions to the W3C's SPARQL protocol and RDF query language. 

SPARQL is a protocol and query language for the Semantic Web. SPARQL is defined in terms of the W3C's RDF data model and will work for any data source that can be mapped into RDF, which potentially includes sources of geospatial data. The OGC GeoSPARQL standard supports representing and querying geospatial data on the Semantic Web. GeoSPARQL provides the foundational geospatial vocabulary for linked data involving location and defines extensions to SPARQL for processing geospatial data. This standard serves as a common target for vendors to implement and provides rich functionality for building geospatial applications.

GeoSPARQL follows a modular design. A core component defines top-level RDFS/OWL classes for spatial objects. A geometry component defines RDFS data types for serializing geometry data, RDFS/OWL classes for geometry object types, geometry-related RDF properties, and non-topological spatial query functions for geometry objects. A geometry topology component defines topological query functions. A topological vocabulary component defines RDF properties for asserting topological relations between spatial objects, and a query rewrite component defines rules for transforming a simple triple pattern that tests a topological relation between two features into an equivalent query involving concrete geometries and topological query functions.

The candidate OGC GeoSPARQL Standard documents are available for review and comment below.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate version 3.3 of the OGC Geography Markup Language (GML). GML 3.3 builds on GML 3.2.1, published by ISO as ISO 19136:2007, and extends GML with additional schema components based on requirements requested by various domains of interest. For example, the 3d modeling community suggest the addition of triangular meshes (TINs) to GML. GML 3.3 is fully backwards compatible with GML 3.2.

GML defines an XML data encoding for geographic data and a grammar to express models of such data using XML Schema. GML has come into wide use since it was first adopted as an OGC standard in 2001 (http://www.ogcnetwork.net/gmlprofiles for examples). GML is the standard that enables information communities and other standards organizations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and OASIS to insert geospatial elements into their standards and be confident that their standards will be compatible with mainstream information infrastructure methods of conveying spatial/temporal information.

Some of the changes between the previous version 3.2.1 and 3.3 are:

• Support for additional date representations based on ISO 8601 (Representation of dates and times)
• Support for an additional, compact encoding of commonly used geometry types
• Support for a new encoding of Triangulated Irregular Networks (TINs)
• Support for Linear Referencing
• Extensions to the XML encoding rule
• Support for grids used by the meteorological and ocean observation communities

All extensions are made in separate XML namespaces to support a modular use of components from the GML schema.

Information on the change requests addressed in GML v3.3 can be found athttp://external.opengeospatial.org/twiki_public/GML/ChangeRequests. The candidate OGC GML v3.3 Standard documents are available for review and comment below.

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

Most sensor networks require careful manual installation and configuration by technicians to assure that software components are properly associated with the physical instruments that they represent. Instrument driver software, configuration files, and "metadata" describing the instrument and its capabilities must be manually installed and associated with a physical instrument port. Sometimes these manual procedures must be performed under physically challenging conditions, increasing the chances of human error. PUCK addresses these challenges by defining a standard instrument protocol to retrieve metadata and other information from the device itself. This information can include OGC SWE SensorML and IEEE 1451 Transducer Electronic Data Sheet (TEDS) documents, as well as actual instrument driver code. Computers on the network can use the PUCK protocol to retrieve this information from installed instruments and utilize it appropriately, e.g. to automatically identify, configure and operate the instruments. Thus PUCK enables automatic self-configuring "plug-and-work" sensor networks.

PUCK is relatively simple, and several manufacturers have implemented the protocol in their instruments' firmware. PUCK augments but doesn't replace existing instrument command sets, so can be implemented without abandoning existing firmware and software applications. PUCK was originally developed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) for oceanographic applications, but is useful in any sensor network containing RS232 or Ethernet-connected instruments. PUCK-enabled instruments have been deployed on ocean observatories in the USA and Europe, and the protocol is being considered for adoption by other projects as well. The OGC Technical Committee’s PUCK Standards Working Group was chartered to process the existing MBARI PUCK protocol as a candidate OGC standard compatible with the OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards baseline.

The candidate OGC PUCK Standard documents are available for review and comment below.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate standard “Earth Observation Metadata profile of the OGC Observations and Measurements Standard.” 

The Earth Observation (EO) profile of Observations and Measurements is intended to provide a standard schema for encoding Earth Observation metadata to support the description and cataloguing of products from sensors aboard EO satellites.

This second version of the Earth Observation metadata profile is based on Observations and Measurements, an OGC and ISO standard used in several communities. For example, O&M is used as a basis for the application schemas in several draft INSPIRE Annex II+III data specifications.

The metadata elements defined in this candidate standard are applicable for use in catalogues and applications, including various EO cataloguing applications based on OGC standards like the ebRIM Application Profile of the OGC Catalog Services – Web (CS-W) Interface Standard.

EO products are differentiated by parameters such as date of acquisition and location as well as characteristics pertaining to the type of sensor, such as cloud, haze, smoke or other phenomena obscuring optical imagery. Metadata used to distinguish EO product types are defined in this candidate standard for generic products and also for specific thematic EO products, such as optical, radar, atmospheric, altimetry, limb-looking and synthesized products. In addition, this document describes the mechanism used to extend these schemas to specific EO missions.

The candidate OGC Earth Observation Metadata profile of Observations & Measurements Standard documents are available for review and comment below.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate OGC Open GeoSMS Standard - Core.

The candidate OGC Open GeoSMS Standard allows applications to location enable Short Message Service (SMS). SMS is the text communication service component of phone, web and mobile communication systems. SMS uses standardized communications protocols that allow the exchange of short text messages between fixed line or mobile phone devices.

Open GeoSMS enables developers to use extended Short Message Service (SMS) to facilitate communication of location content between different LBS (Location-Based Service) devices or applications. The encoding is extremely light weight and the standards document is quite short.
 
The Taiwan Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) contributed this candidate standard to the OGC. Open GeoSMS is already in use in a number of deployed commercial applications in Taiwan as well as in a number of disaster response applications such as those provided by Sahana.

The candidate OGC Open GeoSMS Standard can be found below.  The period for issuing comments expires on 24 April 2011.