OGC Press Releases

5 July 2012 - To support compliance testing, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) requests reference implementations for client software that implements the OGC Web Map Service (WMS) 1.3 Interface Standard. Development and testing of WMS 1.3 Reference Implementations will be coordinated and managed as part of the Compliance and Interoperability Testing & Evaluation (CITE) Thread in this year's major OGC Web Services Testbed Initiative (OWS-9). Funding is available to selected participants. To be considered for funding, interested parties are invited to submit a two-page proposal containing a description of their implementations and an estimate of their development/testing costs. Responses must be sent to techdesk [at] opengeospatial [dot] org by August 5 to be considered for funding.

The OGC Compliance Program (CITE) provides the resources, procedures, and policies for improving software implementations' compliance with OGC standards. The Compliance Program provides an online free testing facility, a process for certification and branding of compliant products, and coordination of a vibrant community that develops and supports test scripts. Implementations that pass CITE tests are eligible to pay a Trademark License Fee to use the "Certified OGC Compliant" brand in packaging and marketing.

The WMS standard provides an interface for requesting geo-registered map images from one or more distributed geospatial databases. A WMS request defines the geographic layer(s) and area of interest to be processed. The response to the request is one or more geo-registered map images (returned as JPEG, PNG, etc.) that can be displayed in a browser application. The interface also supports the ability to specify whether the returned images should be transparent so that layers from multiple servers can be combined or not.

Development of abstract and executable test suites (ETS) for WMS 1.3 clients is underway as part of the OWS-9 initiative. A beta test is available at the CITE Beta website. The current draft of the WMS test suite is available at the OGC SVN repository.

OGC Members with WMS 1.3 client implementations are invited to become WMS CITE Initiative sponsors by making these resources available for free for "black box" testing. The implementation will be tested between July and December of 2012. Tests and reference implementations are to be completed by December of 2012. The first three implementations to pass 100% of the testing process during the release candidate phase will have their Trademark License Fee waived for their first complete annual licensing period.

For more information about this opportunity, please contact: Luis Bermudez, OGC Director of Interoperability Certification, lbermudez [at] opengeospatial [dot] org.

The OGC(R) is an international consortium of more than 450 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. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact/.

David Wesloh Receives OGC’s Gardels Award

Wayland, MA, USA, 26 June 2012. At the June meeting of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC(R)) in Exeter, England, David Wesloh received the OGC's prestigious Kenneth D. Gardels Award (http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/awards). The Gardels Award, a gold medallion, 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.

David Wesloh's contribution has been his unflagging support for the OGC standards process and his management of the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's relationship with the OGC since 2004. He has consistently shown a high degree of personal commitment and technical awareness in working with NGA to establish NGA's requirements for OGC interoperability initiatives. David has done much to educate others in his community about the importance of OGC standards and the OGC process. He has earned respect in the Technical Committee for his depth of technical understanding and his interest in working the consensus process to deliver maximum value for OGC stakeholders.

David Wesloh has been actively involved in OGC testbeds for the last six years, as well as numerous plugfests, concept development studies and pilot projects initiated under the OGC's Interoperability Program. He frequently plays an active role in OGC Technical Committee Standards Working Groups to bring testbed results into the standardization program.

Currently, David is chair of the OGC Web Services Context Standards Working Group, a charter member of the Geosynchronization Standards Working Group, and a participant in numerous other OGC working groups.

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 in 1999.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 445 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.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the Association of Geographic Information (AGI) have joined forces to offer European organizations the chance to learn more about open standards and interoperability. Hosted at the Met Office in Exeter on Friday, 22nd June 2012, following the OGC Technical Committee meetings earlier that week, the day will be of interest to everyone in the geospatial community, especially those who want to know more about what Open Government and international geospatial standards can offer them and their organisation.
 
If you are interested in standards policy and the EC INSPIRE Directive, or the recent UK Government consultation on Open Standards, there will be representation from Central Government, Ordnance Survey Great Britain and the Met Office, amongst others. If you are more technically minded there will be a hands-on workshop where you’ll get the chance to try out OGC compliant Web services and data feeds in open source software. Remember to bring your laptop!
 
Provisional Programme:
 
0900 Registration, coffee and exhibition
0930 Welcome
0940 What is the OGC? - Steven Ramage, OGC
1000 Why Met Office are using Open Standards - Chris Little, Met Office
1030 OGC Standards and INSPIRE - Graham Vowles, Bloxstore
1100 Coffee and exhibition
1120 Open Standards in the UK Location Programme - Alex Coley, Environment Agency
1200 Open Standards Workshop - Mike Saunt, Astun Technology
1300 Lunch and exhibition, sponsored by 1Spatial
1400 OGC Compliance Program - George Percivall, OGC and Jens Fitzke, lat/lon
1440 Coffee and exhibition
1500 Using Open Standards at Ordnance Survey - Andy Howles, Ordnance Survey GB
1540 Closing Session
 
Interoperability Day location:
Met Office
FitzRoy Road
Exeter
Devon
EX1 3PB
 
Registration
This is a free event, but registration is required. Please register at https://portal.agi.org.uk/App/MemberPages/frmLogin.aspx?Event=311.
 
Sponsors and Exhibitors
 
1Spatial is sponsoring the refreshments. Astun Technology is exhibiting at this event. If you are interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at this event, please contact Claire Huppertz claire.huppertz _at_ agi.org.uk. The cost to exhibit is £200+VAT for corporate members
 
GeoDrinks - 21st June
 
The Interoperability Day event will be preceded by a GeoDrinks event (21st June at 1900), to be held at The Well House Tavern, 16 Cathedral Yard, in Exeter. This will be a free event, however, registration is required so we know how many to expect. Please register here: http://geodrinks-sw-june-2012.eventbrite.com/
 
See details of the OGC Technical Committee meeting and instructions for Technical Committee meeting registration at http://www.opengeospatial.org/event/1206tc.
 
Continuous Professional Development (CPD)
 
AGI members: Please note that as a delegate at this event you can allocate 4 points towards the AGI continuing professional development scheme. More information on the scheme can be found here. Attendance certificates can be requested.
 
About the AGI
 
The Mission of the AGI is to maximise the use of geographic information (GI) in the UK for the benefit of the citizen, good governance and commerce. With over 2000 named members, individual and corporate, AGI is THE membership body for everyone with an interest or involvement with GI and has been active since 1989. Now in its 22nd year, 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 Standard's Committee for Geographic Information (IST36), amongst its many other activities. Visit the AGI website at http://www.agi.org.uk/.
 
About the OGC
 
The OGC is an international consortium of more than 445 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.

June 1, 2012 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) membership seeks comments on an OGC candidate standard, the Network Common Data Form (NetCDF) NetCDF Enhanced Data Model Extension Encoding Standard.  This document specifies an extension to the existing OGC Network Common Data Form (NetCDF) Core Encoding Standard version 1.0.

The OGC netCDF encoding supports electronic encoding of geospatial data, specifically digital geospatial information representing space- and time-varying phenomena. NetCDF (network Common Data Form) is widely used internationally to communicate and store many kinds of multidimensional data, although it was originally developed for the Earth science community.  The netCDF data model is particularly well suited to providing data in forms familiar to atmospheric and oceanic scientists: namely, as sets of related arrays. NetCDF was developed and is maintained and actively supported by the Unidata Program Center (http://www.unidata.ucar.edu) of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR).

The netCDF classic data model has previously been established as the core OGC CF-netCDF standard.  With this extension to the core standard for the enhanced data model, complex data structures can be represented very easily, allowing for more efficient programming. In performance-critical applications, the enhanced model provides significant benefits. Moreover, if existing HDF5 (Hierarchical Data Format, release 5) applications that depend on groups, user-defined types, unsigned types, or strings produce or use these data, the netCDF enhanced data model is required. The recently introduced candidate NetCDF Enhanced Data Model Extension Encoding Standard is the latest step in a longer-term plan for establishing CF-netCDF as an OGC standard for binary encoding, which will enable standard delivery of data in binary form via several OGC service interface standards, including the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS), Web Feature Service (WFS), and Sensor Observation Service (SOS) Interface Standards.

The candidate OGC Network Common Data Form (NetCDF) NetCDF Enhanced Data Model Extension Encoding Standard and information about submitting comments on this document are available at  http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/88. The public comment period closes on July 1, 2012.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 445 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.

1 June 2012 - Members of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®), an international standards development organization, invite participation in an Energy & Utilities Geospatial Standards Ad Hoc Meeting to be held on Monday, 18 June 2012 at 1600-1755 BST (UTC/GMT +1 hour) in Exeter, England. This meeting, focused on Smart Grid standards, will be part of the upcoming OGC Technical Committee meeting to be held June 18-21 in Exeter.

In the energy and utility information standards worlds, compatibility with geospatial standards from other domains such as meteorology, urban planning and emergency response is an increasingly critical communication requirement. This group of OGC members, who are finalizing an OGC Energy & Utilities Domain Working Group (E&U DWG) charter, plan to focus on geospatial standards that impact the energy and utility domain, of which one subset are those that are Smart Grid related. At this meeting, the members seek further input on both the draft charter and on Smart Grid standards from the European energy and utility standards community. Those interested in presenting or attending should contact Renee Bogle Hughes <rhughes [at] synaptitudeconsulting [dot] com">rhughes [at] synaptitudeconsulting.com>. As the agenda develops, details will be posted at http://www.opengeospatial.org/event/1206tcagenda.

The ability to communicate geospatial information is seen as a crosscutting requirement in Smart Grid standards efforts worldwide. The OASIS eMIX (Energy Market Information Exchange) standard uses the OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding Standard. The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) CIM (Common Information Model) standard is in the process of being "harmonized" with WXXM (Weather Information Exchange Model). WXXM is an industry standard based on GML. More standards coordination and development, however, is required to enable efficient geospatial communication within smart grids and between smart grids and "neighboring" activities such as emergency response, disaster management, urban planning and building energy management.

Many of the OGC's domains of activity – sensor webs, weather, indoor/outdoor location integration, 3D city models, location services, data fusion and others – have significance in the energy and utilities domain. Many OGC members have a stake in the Smart Grid information technology market, the growth of which depends on the evolution of a standards infrastructure that includes location standards.

This meeting (an "ad hoc" meeting in the OGC's formal meeting nomenclature) follows a similar meeting in Austin, Texas on March 20 that confirmed strong interest among US Smart Grid standards players in addressing open geospatial standards for the Smart Grid. International participants at the Austin meeting met subsequently to draft an Energy & Utilities Domain Working Group charter, which will be voted on by the OGC membership at the Exeter meeting.

See details of the OGC Technical Committee meeting and instructions for registration at http://www.opengeospatial.org/event/1206tc.

OGC staff and Renee Bogle Hughes of Synaptitude Consulting will facilitate the meeting. We hope you will attend.

About the OGC

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 445 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.

24 April 2012.  - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) membership has adopted Version 2.0 of the OGC City Geography Markup Language (CityGML) Encoding Standard (http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/citygml).

CityGML is a community defined information model and XML-based encoding for the representation, storage, and exchange of virtual 3D city and landscape models. CityGML provides a standard model and mechanism for describing 3D objects with respect to their geometry, topology, semantics and appearance, and defines five different levels of detail. CityGML is highly scalable and datasets can include different urban entities supporting the general trend toward modeling not only individual buildings but also whole sites, districts, cities, regions, and countries.

CityGML provides much more than 3D content for visualization by diverse applications. It allows users to share virtual 3D city and landscape models for sophisticated analysis and display tasks in application domains such as environmental simulations, energy demand estimations, city lifecycle management, urban facility management, real estate appraisal, disaster management, pedestrian navigation, robotics, urban data mining, and location based marketing. Because CityGML is based on the OGC Geography Markup Language Encoding Standard (GML), it can be used with the whole family of OGC web services for data accessing, processing, and cataloging.

CityGML has been implemented in many software solutions and is in use in many projects around the world. In National Spatial Data Infrastructure programs in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Malaysia, Abu Dhabi and other countries, CityGML provides an important platform for the transition from 2D to 3D data. It also plays an important role in bridging Urban Information Models with Building Information Models (BIM) to improve interoperability among information systems used in the design, construction, ownership and operation of buildings and capital projects.

In comparison to Version 1.0, CityGML Version 2.0 defines additional feature types and new feature properties including new thematic modules for tunnels and bridges; the ability to model footprint and roof edge representations for buildings in order to allow users to derive 3D models from existing 2D building data; and generic attribute sets, allowing users a more powerful way to customize CityGML without the need for additional coding. Since all elements of Version 1.0 were preserved, CityGML 1.0 files can easily be converted into V2.0 by a simple substitution of the namespace values. A comprehensive test dataset illustrating all data concepts and structures is available for download at www.citygml.org.

CityGML was originally defined and submitted to the OGC by the Special Interest Group 3D (SIG 3D) (http://www.sig3d.org) of the Spatial Data Infrastructure Germany (GDI-DE), which has also substantially contributed to and implemented the current version of CityGML.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 435 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.

26 March 2012 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announced that the U.A.E. Ministry of the Interior, represented by Abu Dhabi Police GIS Center for Security, has become a Principal Member of the OGC to chair a new, planned international OGC Law Enforcement and Public Safety Working Group.

In addition to advancing technical standards and best practices as voting members of the OGC Technical Committee, Principal Members provide guidance on market direction and Consortium focus, vote to approve nominations to the OGC Board of Directors, and have authority over the development, release and adoption of OGC standards through their voting rights in the OGC Planning Committee.

The Abu Dhabi Police GIS Center for Security aims to contribute to the OGC GovFuture Program and other consortium activities that guide local, sub-national, national & international government organizations in raising awareness and adoption of OGC standards in geospatial systems and geographical information, which are critically important in government decision support systems. Abu Dhabi Police is interested in initiating and leading a Domain Working Group that would be supported by police, emergency and security forces from the UAE, the Middle East region and other world regions. The goal is to drive geospatial technology standards and approaches that support law enforcement, public safety and security, as well as encouraging research, projects, events and outreach that contribute to achieving this goal.

Mark Reichardt, President of the OGC, said, “By becoming a Principal Member in the OGC, the U.A.E. Ministry of the Interior has shown a strong commitment to the open standards community and its leadership in advancing OGC standards for improved decision making across government. It's also important for the Middle East region that we now have an OGC Principal Member from the UAE."

"We are pleased to be the first police force in the world to be a Principal Member of the OGC, and in a position to chair a focused domain working group at the global level," said Captain Mohammed Saleh Al Mansoori, head of the GIS Center for Security in the U.A.E. "This initiative contributes to our mission of becoming an intelligence-led police force by investing in information and knowledge and adopting technology best practices and standards to fulfill our tasks and duties as a force."

About the Abu Dhabi Police GIS Center for Security

The Abu Dhabi Police GIS Center for Security has developed a strategic roadmap to utilize the capabilities of spatial systems in areas of law enforcement, public safety and homeland security. It is setting a new standard on how to plan, think and operate spatially to make location count in law enforcement and public safety.

About the OGC

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 435 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.  See the new OGC video: http://www.youtube.com/ogcvideo.

8 March 2012 – The Group on Earth Observations (GEO) has announced a Call for Participation (CFP) in the 5th phase of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) Architecture Implementation Pilot (AIP-5). The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) provides leadership in AIP-5 and invites OGC members and other organizations to respond to the CFP. The CFP document is available at: http://earthobservations.org/geoss_call_aip.shtml.

AIP-5 places a priority on these areas:

• Increase GEOSS capacity to support several societal benefit areas (SBAs): Disasters, Health, Energy, Water and Agriculture. 
• Deploy user management and authentication to support GEOSS Data-CORE
• Conduct research to be considered for the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI)

Responses to this CFP are requested by 11 April 2012. Discussion and clarification of the CFP and the initiation of AIP-5 will be the topic of weekly teleconferences. Agenda and logistics for these telecons are posted at http://www.ogcnetwork.net/AIPtelecons.

The Point of Contact for the AIP initiative is George Percivall, gpercivall [at] opengeospatial [dot] org.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 435 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.

GEO (Group on Earth Observations) is a voluntary partnership of 151 governments and international organizations, launched in response to calls for action by the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development and by the G8 (Group of Eight) leading industrialized countries. GEO is coordinating efforts to build a Global Earth Observation System of Systems, or GEOSS.

See http://earthobservations.org/about_geo.shtml.