OGC Press Releases

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.

8 August 2013 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) is seeking comments on the candidate OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Interface Standard Range Subsetting 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 Range Subsetting Extension document establishes a standard way to extract specific fields from the range set of a coverage during server-side processing of a coverage in a WCS GetCoverage request. This operation is very common in many application domains, for example in remote sensing where it is known as “band” or “channel” subsetting and in climate modeling where it is called “variable extraction”.

All OGC standards are free. The candidate OGC WCS Range Subsetting Extension Standard can be downloaded from http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/106

The OGC WCS Standards Working Group will consider all comments when preparing a final draft of the candidate standard. The comment period ends 7 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.

6 August 2013 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comments on the current draft of the candidate OGC GeoPackage (GPKG) Standard. The GPKG Standards Working Group (SWG) will consider all submitted comments when they prepare a final draft of the GeoPackage Standard.

The candidate OGC GeoPackage Standard provides an open, non-proprietary, platform-independent SQLite container for distribution and direct use of all kinds of geospatial data, including vector features and tile matrix sets.  GeoPackage can be used by mobile device users who require geospatial application services and associated data in disconnected or limited network connectivity environments where open, sharable geospatial data to support their applications is frequently unavailable. GeoPackage supports applications that involve creation of geospatial data products in enterprise computing environments, data product distribution to other computing environments, mobile workforce data capture and updates, and volunteered geographic information.

The GeoPackage container and related GPKG SQLite Extension configuration and API will increase the cross-platform interoperability of geospatial applications and web services in the mobile world.  Standard configuration and APIs for access and management of GeoPackage data will provide consistent query and update results across such applications and services. 

All OGC standards are free and publicly available. Download the candidate GeoPackage Standard. Comments are due by 5 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. OGC is also releasing the GeoPackage spec on GitHub.  Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

30 July 2013. The Location Based Marketing Association (The LBMA) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) recently signed a liaison agreement.

Mark Reichardt, president and CEO of the Open Geospatial Consortium, explained, "We are very pleased to be setting out to work on projects of mutual interest with the Location Based Marketing Association. Their membership is focused on 'collaborative innovation at the intersection of people, places and media' and our membership is focused on making spatial information readily accessible and shareable. We've set the stage for a number of joint outreach and communication projects that will benefit members of both organizations. Also, we believe there is great potential in working together to promote the idea of an open database for Points of Interest (POIs)."

Asif Khan, president and Founder of the LBMA, said, "This new partnership with the Open Geospatial Consortium will help our members gain a better understanding of the importance of place data standardization, while at the same time enabling us to share in the opportunity to educate the public and others on the growing desire of marketers to leverage location data in a way that respects privacy and provides hyper-relevance.”

About the OGC: 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 spatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

About the Location Based Marketing Association (LBMA): 
The Location Based Marketing Association is a group dedicated to the fostering of a community of interest around all avenues of advertising and marketing as it relates to location-specific opportunities. This community is comprised of mobile, out-of-home, digital and print advertisers. Our goal is simply to educate, share best practices, establish guidelines for growth and promote the services of member companies to brands and other content-related providers.  Visit the LBMA website at http://www.thelbma.com

23 July 2013 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) is seeking comments on the candidate OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Interface Standard Processing 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 Processing Extension standard specifies the standard service interface to a Web Coverage Processing Service (WCPS) query language that may optionally be implemented by WCS servers. WCPS extends WCS functionality with a high-level query language for server-side filtering and processing of multi-dimensional Big Data. Servers may transparently parallelize such queries over multiple cluster or cloud nodes. To this end, the WCS extension defines an additional request type, ProcessCoverages, beyond the core WCS request types GetCapabilities, DescribeCoverage, and GetCoverage.

All OGC standards are free and publicly available. Download the candidate OGC WCS Processing Extension Standard.  Comments are due by 22 August 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.

17 July 2013. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) is seeking comments on the charter [ available at: http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/54744 ] for a proposed OGC Standards Working Group (SWG). The new SWG will revise the Earth Observation Metadata profile of Observations & Measurements, an existing OGC standard for documenting Earth Observation (EO) product metadata. It will also develop a new, related standard to extend the use of OpenSearch for discovery of EO products.

The SWG will consider change requests for the charter that have been posted through 16 August 2013 via an email message sent to charter-requests [at] opengeospatial [dot] org (subject: EOPMOS%20Charter) .

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.

15 July 2013. 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 Testbed 10.

The RFQ/CFP is available at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/103.

Responses are due by 5 pm EST on 26 August 2013.

An IP Program and Testbed 10 Q&A Webinar will be held on 6 August 2013. More information will be available at the RFQ/CFP URL above. You are also invited to follow us on twitter, Linkedin or Facebook to stay updated on the Q&A Webinar, clarifications to requirements, kickoff details, etc.

The OGC Testbed 10 Kickoff event for the CCI and Open Mobility threads (see below) will be held 7-9 October 2013 in Washington, DC. The Aviation thread kickoff will be held 27 September in Frascati, Italy during the week of the OGC Technical Committee Meeting in Frascati.

The Point of Contact is Nadine Alameh: techdesk [at] opengeospatial [dot] org.

The OGC Testbed 10 sponsors are:

• AGC (Army Geospatial Center, US Army Corps of Engineers)
• ESA (European Space Agency)
• EUROCONTROL
• FAA (US Federal Aviation Administration)
• GeoConnections - Natural Resources Canada
• Harris Corporation
• Lockheed Martin Corporation
• NGA (US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency)
• NOAA National Weather Service
• USGS (US Geological Survey)

OGC Testbed 10 builds on the outcomes of prior OGC initiatives (http://www.opengeospatial.org/resource/demos) and is organized around the following threads:

-   Cross-Community Interoperability (CCI): Increase Geospatial community interoperability by building on CCI OWS-9 work in semantic mediation, volunteer geographic information (VGI), provenance and data quality, and Global Gazetteer. Explore the potential of interoperability in the hydrology domain and utilizing ontologies to more easily share and visualize geospatial data.

-   Open Mobility: Explore the geospatial standards requirements needed to support the growing emerging mobile environment where client applications are mobile, information services are mobile, and increasingly distributed across cloud infrastructures. The Open Mobility thread will address these requirements while leveraging on the work achieved in the OWS-9 Testbed in the areas of Geopackages and Geopackaging services and new OWS Context encodings.

-   Aviation: Develop and demonstrate the use of the Aeronautical Information Exchange Model (AIXM) and the Flight Information Exchange Model (FIXM), building on the work accomplished in prior testbeds to advance the applications of OGC Web Services standards in next generation air traffic management systems to support European and US aviation modernization programs.

The RFQ/CFP includes details of these threads as well as details on participation eligibility, selection process and kickoff workshop information.

OGC testbeds, pilot projects and interoperability experiments are part of the OGC Interoperability Program, a global, hands-on collaborative agile prototyping program designed to rapidly develop, test and deliver proven candidate standards into the OGC Standards Program, where they are formalized for public release.

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. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/.

9 July 2013 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) is seeking comments on the candidate OGC OWS Context Encoding Standard.  This standard is comprised of three documents:

• Conceptual Model Document
• Atom Encoding Document
• Schemas and Examples

The OGC Web Services Context Document (OWS Context) standard was created to allow a set of configured information resources (service set) to be passed between applications primarily as a collection of services. OWS Context is designed to support limited in-line content as well. The goal is to support use cases such as the distribution of search results and the exchange of a set of resources such as OGC Web Feature Service (WFS), Web Map Service (WMS), Web Map Tile Service (WMTS), Web Coverage Service (WCS) and others in a ‘common operating picture’ supporting situational awareness. Additionally OWS Context can deliver a set of configured processing services (Web Processing Service (WPS)) parameters to allow the processing to be reproduced on different nodes.

This initial call for comment is for two (2) OWS Context documents: A Conceptual Model and the ATOM encoding for the conceptual model. The Conceptual model document describes the use cases, requirements, conceptual data model of the OWS Context encoding standard. The goal of the model is to provide a core model, which is extended and encoded as defined in extensions to this standard. A Context reference is a fully configured service set to be defined and consistently interpreted by clients. The ATOM encoding is the first extension of the core (conceptual model).

Please register your comments on this candidate standard at  http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/102. The OGC OWS Context Standards Working Group will consider all comments when preparing a final draft of the candidate standard. The comment period ends 8 August 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.

For Immediate Release

27 June 2013 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announced a call for public comment on the OGC WaterML 2.0 – part 2: Ratings, Gaugings and Sections Discussion Paper. This OGC discussion paper can be downloaded from http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/dp.
This document describes an information model for exchanging rating tables, or rating curves, that are used for the conversion of related hydrological phenomenon (e.g. a stage-discharge relationship). The specification also describes a model for the observations that are used to develop such relationships, often referred to as gaugings, or gauging observations.
The information model is proposed as a second part of the OGC WaterML 2.0 suite of standards, building on OGC WaterML 2.0: Part 1, which addresses the exchange of time series data.
The following organizations submitted this document to the Open Geospatial Consortium:

• CSIRO
• Australian Bureau of Meteorology
• Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, UK
• KISTERS
• San Diego Supercomputer Centre, University of California
• USGS
• Aquatic Informatics

The joint WMO/OGC Hydrology Domain Working Group will consider all comments when preparing a final draft of the candidate standard. This draft will be used for testing within an upcoming Interoperability Experiment. Interested parties are encouraged to get in contact with the working group.
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.

17 June 2013. On June 5, at the Sensors Expo & Conference, Melanie Martella, Executive Editor of Sensors, presented the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) with the magazine's 2013 Best of Sensors Gold Application Award. Greg Buehler, OGC's Director, Outreach & Communication Services, accepted the award.

The Best of Sensors Application Awards recognize advances in sensor and sensor-related technologies, either in the form of novel technologies or as significant improvements in existing technologies.

Melanie Martella said, "I am thrilled to to recognize the OGC for its Sensor Web Enablement Initiative. The consortium's members who have worked on this project over the years are creating a robust platform that makes it easier for people to make efficient and effective use of the wealth of Web-connected sensor data available. This is an important project with broad scope and I congratulate them on their achievement."

Mark Reichardt, President and CEO of the OGC, said, "This is a wonderful honor that recognizes the vision and hard work of a very large number of OGC member representatives. Mike Botts, chair of the OGC Sensor Web Enablement Domain Working Group, deserves special mention for bringing SensorML into OGC 13 years ago and creating the momentum in OGC to advance our sensor standards framework. He still leads the working group effort, but scores of others have also worked to make these standards an extraordinary and very important part of easing the integration of sensors into the broader IT infrastructure. This award honors their service, and they can all be very proud of what they've done."

The Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) (http://www.ogcnetwork.net/swe) standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) comprise the only truly open international standards suite that provides a comprehensive platform for publishing, discovering, assessing, accessing and using sensors and sensor systems of all kinds. The standards documents are freely available on the web, as are open source software implementations of the standards. Their use requires no proprietary platform support of any kind, and yet they can be implemented on platforms other than the open Internet and Web. The encodings and interfaces are based on fundamental, widely used and open Internet and Web standards and best programming practices. The consensus process in which SWE standards are created and maintained is open to all who want to participate.

SWE standards have been implemented in hundreds of applications by private sector, government and university developers. A few examples include:

·       US National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Integrated Oceans Observing System (IOOS)

·       CitySense sensor network City of Cambridge, MA: A real-time data integration and analysis system for air quality assessment.

·      German Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System (GITEWS)

·       Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand - Nepal Wireless Project: Monitoring Climate Change in the Himalayas

·       Taiwan – Debris Flow Monitoring and Alerting system

·       Japan National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science & Technology (AIST): Earthquake Monitoring and Warning System (QuiQuake)

·       Europe/European Space Agency (ESA): Tasking of satellite assets as part of Heterogeneous Missions Accessibility (HMA)

·       EO2Heaven project (http://www.eo2heaven.org/): A spatial information infrastructure, which applies SWE, services to monitor human exposure to environmental pollution and for an early detection of infections.

·       Europe Emergency Response: (http://www.ess-project.eu/ an infrastructure based on SOS, SPS, and SES to provide real-time information to crisis managers during abnormal events to improve the management between forces on the ground (e.g., police and firefighters) and the control centers.

·       CSIRO’s South Esk River Hydrological Sensor Web in Tasmania - next generation catchment management

·       US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Unified Incident Command and Decision Support (UICDS) program

About the OGC

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.