OGC Press Releases

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) is pleased to announce that DigitalGlobe has raised its membership level from Technical Committee level to Principal level. As a Principal member, DigitalGlobe will participate in OGC's Planning Committee to explore market and technology trends relevant to OGC's mission, to assure that OGC's policies and procedures remain effective and agile in a changing technology environment, and to act as final approval authority for all OGC standards.

“The work the OGC does in creating open source standards for geospatial information is key to what we do at DigitalGlobe,” said Walter Scott, Founder and Chief Technology Officer at DigitalGlobe. “Our purpose is to ‘see a better world’ and global standards for geospatial data enable us and the industry to innovate at an accelerated rate to solve pressing global problems.”

"DigitalGlobe is a key player in the Earth imaging industry. Principal Membership in the OGC enables them to play a greater role in providing important open standards that help put the power of earth imaging into the hands of users and decision-makers worldwide," said Mark Reichardt, President and CEO of the OGC.  "We look forward to DigitalGlobe's continued involvement in OGC's Technical Committee, and we welcome their voting participation in OGC's Planning Committee."

About DigitalGlobe

DigitalGlobe is a leading provider of commercial high-resolution earth observation and advanced geospatial solutions that help decision makers better understand our changing planet in order to save lives, resources and time. Sourced from the world's leading constellation, our imagery solutions deliver unmatched coverage and capacity to meet our customers' most demanding mission requirements. Each day customers in defense and intelligence, public safety, civil agencies, map making and analysis, environmental monitoring, oil and gas exploration, infrastructure management, navigation technology, and providers of location-based services depend on DigitalGlobe data, information, technology and expertise to gain actionable insight. For more information, visit www.digitalglobe.com.

About the OGC

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 475 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

2 October 2013 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) is seeking comments on the candidate OGC standard, "Geographic Information – Well Known Text (WKT) for coordinate reference systems."

OGC Well Known Text offers a compact machine-readable and human-readable representation of geometric objects. WKT can also be used for succinctly describing the critical elements of coordinate reference system (CRS) definitions. 

WKT is described in the OGC standard “Geographic information – Simple feature access – Part 1: Common architecture” (also International Standard ISO 19125-1:2004). The WKT representation of coordinate reference systems was subsequently extended in other OGC standards. As a result, there are inconsistencies in how WKT CRS is expressed in various OGC and ISO standards.

This draft standard provides an updated version of WKT representation of coordinate reference systems that follows the provisions of OGC Abstract Specification Topic 2 (ISO 19111:2007) Spatial Referencing by Coordinates. The draft extends earlier WKT to allow for the description of coordinate transformations. This draft standard defines the structure and content of well known text strings. It does not prescribe how implementations should read or write these strings.

Comments are due by 1 November 2013, but we encourage those interested to comment by 26^th October. This draft has been submitted by the OGC to ISO TC211 as a Committee Draft for ballot as a Draft International Standard (document N3596). Comments received as part of the OGC RFC by 26th October will be fed into the ISO ballot. 

All OGC standards are free and publicly available. Download the candidate OGC WKT CRS draft standard at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/112.  A proof of concept evaluation package may be downloaded at https://github.com/Esri/ogc-crs-wkt-parser.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 475 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

30 September 2013. At the September meeting of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC(R)) in Frascati, Italy, Jeff de La Beaujardière, PhD, received the OGC's prestigious Kenneth D. Gardels Award (http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/awards). The Gardels Award is awarded each year to individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to advance OGC's vision of geospatial information fully integrated into the world's information systems.

Instead of accepting the gold medallion associated with this award, Jeff has asked that the equivalent value be applied by OGC to support Individual Memberships to encourage participation in the international standards process.

Dr. de La Beaujardière is currently at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).  "My career since 1994 at NOAA and previously NASA has been entirely focused on making US government data about the environment more accessible to the public," said Jeff. "I feel that access is not merely about removing policy barriers or putting files on a web server. Access is about using open standards to improve usability, and the Open Geospatial Consortium obviously plays a key role in that space."

Jeff de La Beaujardière's participation in the OGC's standards process began in 1998 during the first Web Mapping Testbed while at NASA. He served as Editor of the OGC Web Map Server (WMS) standard versions 1.1 and 1.3 and of the International Standard version (ISO 19128), and was a contributor to other standards. He programmed WMS implementations for the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) Program and the Modeling, Analysis, and Prediction 2005 (MAP’05) Program. As part of NASA's Digital Earth Office and Geospatial Interoperability Office he worked to promote interoperability and ensure OGC standards are able to meet NASA needs to support time-dependent observations and forecast model outputs.

In 2008, Jeff moved from NASA to NOAA, where as Senior System Architect of the US Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) Program he led implementations of OGC's Sensor Web Enablement standards. He now serves as NOAA's Data Management Architect and chair of the Environmental Data Management Committee.  His vision is that all NOAA data will be easily discoverable by potential users, readily accessible and standardized, well documented with good metadata, and archived for future generations. 

The Gardels Award is the OGC’s highest honor bestowed upon a Consortium member representative. It is given annually in memory of Kenneth Gardels, a founding director of OGC and OGC's former director of academic programs. Mr. Gardels coined the term "Open GIS," and devoted his life to the humane and democratic uses of geographic information systems. He died at the age of 44 in 1999.  

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 475 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services and mainstream IT. OGC's open standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

26 September 2013 – Members of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) Modeling and Simulation (M&S) Working Group invite the public to attend a demonstration of new developments in technology and capability to rapidly discover, transform, and stream geospatial data from Internet sources into Modeling and Simulation applications using open standards.  

The demonstration activities, part of the October 13-16 GEOINT 2013 Symposium, will be held in Room 24 at the Tampa Convention Center in Tampa, Florida on 16 October. The Demonstration room will open to the public at 11:00 am EST. Visitors will have an opportunity to meet the developers and discuss the opportunities that arise from standards-based integration of geospatial and M&S systems.

From 2:00-4:00 pm EST in Room 24, a formal presentation will be followed by demonstrations of live-streaming elevation, imagery and feature data being discovered, accessed and used via OGC standards to provide real-world context for synthetic environments in M&S applications. The Demonstration will show simulations to support two hypothetical scenarios -- a military rescue operation against terrorists in Yemen and civilian oil spill response activity in Hawaii.

The following corporations and government agencies have contributed data, hardware, models and simulation applications for the demo:

• CACI
• CAE
• Compusult
• DigitalGlobe
• Envitia
• exactEarth
• NOAA / US IOOS
• VT MAK

The demo will also show how M&S information and capabilities can flow into other systems and be integrated into other systems and applications using open standards.

The USGIF Modeling and Simulation Working Group demonstration is a part of the many professional development offerings at this year’s GEONT Symposium. The GEOINT Symposium is the nation’s largest intelligence event of the year and includes an exciting agenda of keynotes, panel discussions and training offerings. The GEOINT 2013 Symposium exhibit hall will include more than 250 organizations displaying and technologies, services and solutions.
USGIF has opened the USGIF Modeling and Simulation Working Group Demonstration to the public, and there is no charge to attend demonstration. There is a fee to attend any other GEOINT Symposium sessions, trainings or the exhibit hall.
Space is limited for the Modeling and Simulation Demonstration, so attendees must register for this specific demo by sending an email to Ed Curle at ecurle [at] kadsci [dot] com.
Attendees will be invited to enter into a drawing for a Galaxy Note 10.1 Tablet. (Specs: Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, 10.1" touch screen, Wi-Fi, 16GB storage capacity, Google Play, Google Talk, Netflix, and deep gray case.)

A separate Modeling and Simulation highlight of the GEOINT 2013 Symposium will be a presentation on 14 October at 2:00 pm by Dr. Forrest Crane, director of the Army Center for Analysis. Dr. Crane will speak on the expanding role of M&S in Activity Based Intelligence. His presentation will be in the Government Pavilion located in the Center of the USGIF Exhibit Hall.  This event is open to those who have registered for the USGIF's GEOINT 2013: Operationalizing Intelligence for Global Missions, which runs from October 13-16 at the Tampa Convention Center.  
The United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) was founded in 2004 as a non-lobbying, nonprofit educational foundation to promote the geospatial intelligence tradecraft and develop a stronger community of interest among government, industry, academia, professional organizations, and individuals. The Foundation and its participants share a mission focused on the development and application of geospatial intelligence to address national security objectives. For more information about USGIF, visit www.usgif.org.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international consortium of more than 480 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org.

18 September 2013 – The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the Ordnance Survey, with the support of the Association for Geographic Information (AGI), are leading the first of a series of events called the United Kingdom Interoperability Assessment Plugfest (UKIAP) 2013. (See http://www.opengeospatial.org/OSplugfest ). The purpose of UKIAP 2013 is to advance the interoperability of geospatial products and services based on OGC standards within the UK geospatial information (GI) community. 

The results of the Plugfest will allow Ordnance Survey to provide best practice guidance to those who want to consume or implement geospatial web services or products based on OGC standards.  UKIAP 2013 is open to commercial and open source vendors and to all GI organisations in the UK.  The OGC and Ordnance Survey would like to involve as many participants in the initiative as possible.

Participation in the UKIAP offers vendors and open source projects significant national and international exposure to the UK GI community, as well as geospatial technology purchasers in general. The UKIAP is a prime opportunity for the UK GI user community and software vendors to cooperatively test and refine services, interfaces and protocols in the context of a hands-on engineering experience that raises the visibility of all participants. The UKIAP also calls attention to the importance and availability of interoperability. This effort has well-defined objectives, whilst also providing a significant opportunity to explore alternatives. The UKIAP initiative is designed to increase particular client-server interoperability capabilities in a way that leverages and contributes to Ordnance Survey’s vision of interoperable geospatial services across the UK GI sector.

The Call for Participation document is available here. The OGC and Ordnance Survey will have a clarification call on 25 September starting at 10:45 BST. (See details of the call in a footnote at the end of the document.)  Proposals must be received by OGC no later than 1700 BST 2 October 2013.

Ordnance Survey is a government department founded in 1791 and is the national mapping agency of Great Britain. Ordnance Survey maintains the definitive geographic framework of Great Britain and is responsible for the surveying, production, maintenance and marketing of a wide range of geographic information, relied on by government, business and individuals. A dynamic, self-financing £120-million-a-year civilian organisation, Ordnance Survey is at the forefront of the digital economy, producing digital mapping products and paper maps for business, leisure, administrative and educational use. The mission of the Ordnance Survey is to maximise the use of geographic information (GI) for the benefit of the citizen, good governance and commerce.

The AGI exists to represent the interests of the UK's GI industry, a wide-ranging group of public and private sector organisations, suppliers of GI software, hardware, data and services, consultants, academics and interested individuals. It is the membership body for everyone in the UK with an interest or involvement with GI. AGI is a member of the UK Location Council, an INSPIRE Spatial Data Interest Community (SDIC) and provides logistical and expert support to the British Standards Committee for Geographic Information (IST36), amongst its many other activities. The AGI aim to bring you the latest industry and AGI news, information about AGI's many Special Interest Groups (SIGs), Regional Groups, events programme, Continuing Professional Development (CPD), plus our highly acclaimed annual AGI GeoCommunity conference, which is the largest independent geospatial event in the UK.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 475 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Learn more about the OGC at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact. See our recent "What is the OGC?" video.

12 Sep 2013 – The OGC Energy & Utilities Domain Working Group (E&U DWG) invites you to attend presentations on Location Communication in Energy and Utility Worlds in sessions at the upcoming OGC Technical Committee Meetings. This is a unique venue for networking, learning about the OGC's standards development and relationship building processes, and shaping standards infrastructure to support institutional cooperation.

The OGC Energy & Utilities Domain Working Group sessions will be held from 1745 CET to 1840 CET on September 23 and 24, 2013.

The OGC Technical Committee Meetings will be held in Frascati, Italy. Registration for the OGC Technical Committee meeting entitles participants to attend all Technical Committee plenary sessions and all of the Domain Working Group meetings. Register at https://store.opengeospatial.org/. If you are not able to attend the Technical Committee meeting but are interested in attending in the OGC Energy & Utilities Domain Working Group sessions remotely, join the OGC Energy-utilities.dwg listserve for dial-in or login instructions, which will soon be sent to members of this list. Joining this listserve will also keep you informed about the Energy & Utilities Domain Working Group's activities.

CONFIRMED PRESENTATIONS

September 23, 1745 CET to 1840 CET:

• "Semantic 3D City Models for Strategic Energy Planning in Berlin & London"
   Tatjana Kutzner, Technische Universität München

• “Why Energy Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) and Integrated Community Energy Solutions are essential resources for Smart Cities”
   Eddie Oldfield, Principal, Spatial Quest Solutions; Member, National Advisory Committee, QUEST Canada.

• “Why the development of a 'CarbonML' encoding standard will revolutionize the Carbon Trading World"
   Jamie Gairns, Offsetters

September 24, 1745 CET to 1840 CET:

• “The Critical Role of Pipeline Open Data Standards (PODS) in Pipeline Integrity Management”
   Janet Sinclair, Executive Director PODS 

• “Energy Balancing Information Facility. A Smart Grid use case about integration of location into management of energy resources.”
   Paul Janssen, Geonovum, Cerise-Smart Grid Project)

• "Opportunities for OGC Standards-based AR Systems in Energy and Utilities"
   Mike Reynolds, Augmented Technologies, and Christine Perey, PEREY Research & Consulting.

For information about joining the OGC and the OGC Energy and Utilities Domain Working Group, contact Renee Bogle Hughes. Renee is Chair of the OGC Energy & Utilities Domain Working Group and Principal at Energy Transformation Consulting.  RBogleHughes [at] EnergyTransformationConsulting [dot] com, phone +1-610-812-5718.

The OGC Energy & Utilities Domain Working Group (E&U DWG) was chartered last year in acknowledgement of the significant and far reaching global opportunity that collaboration can play in maximizing the value of information technology for the international Energy and Utilities industry. This working group is focused on identifying the relative value of communicating "where" in a broad range of decision making and analytics scenarios in the Energy and Utilities ecosystem. The scope of the working group’s interoperability efforts includes data and systems that are traditionally associated with "smart grid," as well as interoperability needs related to oil and gas pipeline safety, smarter cities, integrated community energy strategies, energy efficient buildings, reduced power outage restoration times and other energy and utility activities. 

About the OGC

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 475 companies, government agencies, research organizations and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, mainstream IT, and wireless and location-based services. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

27 August 2013. The sponsors of the OGC Geo4NIEM Initiative:

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

and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) invite interested organizations to attend the OGC Geo4NIEM Demo public webinar on 19 September 2013 from 1030-1130am EDT. Geo4NIEM is an OGC initiative named Geospatial Enhancements for the US National Information Exchange Model (NIEM).

Working from a scenario in which a hurricane strikes New York City, the initiative's technology provider participants will show how enhanced geospatial capabilities enable situational awareness through the ability to identify, process, and comprehend critical information about an incident. OGC Geo4NIEM Initiative technology provider participants include OGC members Galdos, The Carbon Project, Luciad and ArdentMC.

In the demo, specific Information Exchange Packages (IEPs) from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are implemented using widely employed open standards to support rapid and flexible communication of geospatial information in cross-community information exchange domains such as public safety, emergency management and maritime operations oversight. The following two NIEM information exchanges were used for testing and demonstration in this project.

• The NIEM Request for Information (RFI) exchange facilitates interagency processes involving requirements, tasking and information gathering activities that support data collection and awareness within intelligence, public safety, emergency management and response operations. A NIEM RFI exchange document provides the mechanism through which intelligence analysts and operations managers can request and receive relevant information for processing and analysis.

• The NIEM Vessel Position exchange from 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 OGC Initiative addressed specific functional requirements to meet the following objectives:

• Develop recommendations to enhance the standard use of the OGC Geography Markup Language Encoding Standard (GML) with NIEM data exchanges.
• Develop recommendations to enhance the use of NIEM External Adaptors for geospatial content, including GML.
• Test and demonstrate use of embedded GML and adaptors within NIEM data exchanges.
• Develop Architecture documentation and a fact sheet for the use of embedded GML and adaptors in NIEM data exchanges.
• Develop Recommendations for the inclusion of a Geospatial Domain within NIEM.

Using GML opens up many opportunities to integrate NIEM applications with geospatial web services based on OGC interface standards such as the OGC Web Feature Service (WFS) Interface Standard. Web services that use OGC standards make it possible, for example, to: keep data current with updates from diverse sources; tailor data presentation (e.g. map styles) on the fly for different communities; and exploit powerful cloud based transaction services and processing resources. GML has become a "common language" for spatial communication in NIEM-related domains such as aviation, weather, urban modeling, hydrology and ocean observation.

After the webinar, a detailed Geo4NIEM OGC Engineering Report will be made available to the public on the OGC Public Engineering Report website.

OGC testbeds, pilot projects and interoperability experiments are part of the OGC Interoperability Program, a global, hands-on collaborative prototyping program designed to rapidly develop, test and deliver proven candidate spatial encoding and interface standards into the OGC Standards Program, where they are formalized for release as adopted OGC Standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 475 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/.

22 August, 2013 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) is seeking comments on the candidate OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Interface Standard Interpolation Extension.

The OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Interface Standard defines an open standard interface to access multi-dimensional spatio-temporal coverages, such as sensor data, satellite imagery, image time series, point clouds, and meshes. The candidate WCS Interpolation Extension document specifies parameters to the WCS GetCoverage request that provide control over interpolation of a coverage during its server-side processing. WCS has a core mission to preserve data quality, and by default always delivers original, unaltered data. Whenever interpolation – which may impact accuracy – is necessary, this extension allows clients to specify the interpolation method that the server shall apply. This can even be indicated individually per axis, such as “perform linear interpolation along latitude and longitude, but perform nearest-neighbor interpolation along time.”

An overview of the complete WCS suite is available at http://external.opengeospatial.org/twiki_public/CoveragesDWG/CoveragesBigPicture.

All OGC standards are free and publicly available. Download the candidate OGC WCS Interface Standard Interpolation Extension. Comments are due by 22 September, 2013.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 480 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

20 August 2013 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) is seeking comments on the candidate OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Interface Standard Scaling Extension. 

The OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Interface Standard defines an open standard interface to access multi-dimensional spatio-temporal coverages, such as satellite imagery, image time series, point clouds, and meshes. The candidate WCS Scaling Extension document specifies parameters to the WCS GetCoverage request that provide control over scaling of a coverage during its server-side processing. Scaling refers to retrieving gridded coverages in reduced resolution, such as for thumbnails or lower-resolution overview pictures.

All OGC standards are free and publicly available. Download the candidate OGC WCS Scaling Extension Standard.  Comments are due by 19 September 2013.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 480 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.