OGC Press Releases

2 November 2012 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate OGC Augmented Reality Markup Language (ARML) 2.0 Encoding Standard.

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

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

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

The OGC ARML 2.0 Encoding Standard Evaluation Package is free and can be downloaded from http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/94. The deadline for comments is 2 December 2012.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 465 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.

5 November 2012 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate OGC SensorML 2.0 Encoding Standard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The OGC SensorML 2.0 Encoding Standard Evaluation Package is free and can be downloaded from http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/93. The deadline for comments is 5 December 2012.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 465 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 October 2012 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks comment on a GeoTIFF extension to the OGC GML Coverages (GMLCOV) 1.0 Standard and on a GeoTIFF extension to the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) 2.0 Standard, based on the former.

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

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

To provide maximum flexibility in sharing coverage data, the GML Coverages GeoTIFF extension provides a way to encode coverages that are represented in encoding formats other than GML, such as GeoTIFF. The WCS 2.0 GeoTIFF extension binds the former extension to WCS 2.0 to allow usage of GeoTIFF encoded coverages with WCS. The OGC seeks public comment on the OGC documents describing the candidate GMLCOV and WCS extension standards for encoding GeoTIFF data in GMLCOV and using them with WCS. These documents are free and can be downloaded from http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/92 .The deadline for comments is 29  November 2012.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 465 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.

29 October 2012

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announces that it has appointed Denise McKenzie as Executive Director, Marketing and Communications. Working with OGC staff, board, membership and partner organizations, Denise will be responsible for the planning and execution of marketing, communications and education programs to raise awareness and increase application of OGC standards by technology providers and users worldwide. 

Over the past 12 years Denise has worked with all sectors of the geospatial industry on behalf of the State Government of Victoria (Australia) in areas of strategic policy, collaboration and innovation. Her collaborative work has earned local, national and international industry awards. Throughout her career Denise’s focus has been to utilize public-private partnership and community building to move geospatial from being a niche to a core service within mainstream information technology and decision making process. She has worked in a wide variety of domains including emergency, environment, asset and risk management, business intelligence, positioning and navigation. In the past 12 months she has led the formation of the OGC ANZ Forum and has been working with the Australian and New Zealand Land Information Council (ANZLIC) on the ANZ Spatial Marketplace. 


Mark Reichardt commented, "I am delighted that Denise is joining the OGC staff. She brings a tremendous level of energy, experience, enthusiasm and skill to the OGC international team, including an exceptional background in communications and information technology policy. She has a great track record of bringing people together across our industry's private, public, academic and research sectors to achieve common goals. Leading OGC's international marketing and communications program from an office based in the UK, Denise will also boost OGC's presence in Europe, where we currently have staff in Brussels and Bonn." 

Denise McKenzie added, “It is quite exciting to be joining the OGC at a time when the geospatial and location industry is experiencing such an amazing period of growth, innovation and opportunity. I am looking forward to working with the skilled and passionate community of OGC to promote and share the benefits of our standards across the world.”

The OGC is a major international standards consortium of more than 465 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. The consortium has played the lead role since 1994 in making geospatial information – location, GIS, Earth images, routing, etc. – an integral part of the global information infrastructure.  OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT, empowering technology developers to make geospatial information and services useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

24 October 2012. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announced the formation of a new OGC® Technical Committee Standards Working Group (SWG) to advance the candidate OGC GeoPackage (GPKG) Standard. The OGC members convening this group invite the public to comment on the GeoPackage SWG charter (https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/50347) and will consider comments received before 14 November 2012.

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

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

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

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 465 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 useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact. 

24 October 2012. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate "GML-NIL profile" of the OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding standard. GML is a widely used XML grammar for encoding information about geographical features. The GML-NIL profile provides a way to allow data providers to make a best effort to supply data according to an application schema, even if they do not have values for all feature properties. This is achieved by marking the application schema as a whole as ‘nillable=true’ and using OGC ‘nil’ URIs in links for missing data. This reverses the usual pattern which has a default value of nillable=false.   

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

The candidate OGC GML-NIL standard document is available for review and comment at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/91.

The closing date for comments will be 23 November 2012.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 465 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. 

27 September 2012. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announced the formation of a new OGC® Technical Committee Standards Working Group (SWG) to advance the candidate OGC GeoPackage (GPKG) Standard. The OGC members convening this group invite the public to comment on the GeoPackage SWG charter (https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/50347) and will consider comments received before 11 October 2012.

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

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

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

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 465 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 useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

24 September 2012 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) membership has approved the Enhanced Data Model Extension to the OGC Network Common Data Form (netCDF) Core Encoding Standard. The Enhanced Data Model Extension, along with the Core Encoding Standard, the netCDF Binary Encoding Extension Standard - netCDF Classic, and the 64-bit Offset Format (adopted as official OGC standards in April 2011) are available for free download at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/netcdf.

The enhanced data model (sometimes referred to as the netCDF-4 data model) is an extension to the classic model that adds new forms of data representation and new data types while preserving backward compatibility.  Specifically, it adds six new primitive data types, four user-defined data types, multiple unlimited dimensions, and groups to organize data hierarchically and provide scopes for names.

Although it was originally developed for the Earth science community, netCDF can be used to communicate and store a wide variety of multidimensional data. The netCDF data model is particularly well suited to providing data in forms familiar to atmospheric and oceanic scientists, specifically, as sets of related arrays.

NetCDF is self-documenting, which means it can internally store information used to describe the data. For example, the internal documentation can associate various physical quantities (such as temperature, pressure, and humidity) with spatio-temporal locations (such as points at specific latitudes, longitudes, vertical levels, and times). Climate and Forecast (CF) Metadata Conventions are often used in conjunction with netCDF as a means of specifying semantic information that promotes the processing and sharing of climate and forecast data created with the netCDF application programming interface (API). The semantic metadata is conveyed internally within the netCDF datasets.

NetCDF was developed and is supported by the Unidata Program Center at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) (http://www.ucar.edu/) under sponsorship of the Atmospheric and Geoscience Division of the US Government National Science Foundation.  It has been formally recognized by the US Government’s NASA and NOAA standards bodies. UCAR and other OGC members introduced netCDF into the OGC as a candidate OGC standard to encourage broader international use and greater interoperability among clients and servers interchanging data in binary form. Among other benefits, this will make the large collections of environmental netCDF data more readily accessible and usable by non-experts.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 465 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 September 2012 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has adopted the OGC WaterML 2.0 Part 1: Time Series Encoding Standard as an official OGC standard.

OGC WaterML 2.0 is an important new XML-based international standard for encoding and exchanging data describing the state and location of water resources, both above and below the ground surface. WaterML 2.0 Time Series supports encoding of hydrological and hydrogeological observation data in exchange scenarios such as:

 -- Exchange of data for operational monitoring and forecasting programs
 -- Supporting infrastructure operation (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
 -- Exchange in support of national reporting

The WaterML 2.0 Time Series work was supported through a water information research and development alliance between the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) Water for a Healthy Country Flagship program and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. The work was also supported by the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science Hydrologic Information System (CUAHSI) and many other organizations around the world. The following organizations submitted the candidate standard to the OGC membership for adoption:

 -- Australian Bureau of Meteorology
 -- CSIRO (Australia)
 -- Deltares (Netherlands)
 -- disy Informationssysteme GmbH (Germany)
 -- Federal Waterways Engineering and Research Institute (Germany)
 -- Geological Survey of Canada, Natural Resources Canada
 -- German Federal Institute of Hydrology
 -- International Office For Water – Sandre (France)
 -- KISTERS AG (Germany)
 -- San Diego Supercomputer Center (US)
 -- US Geological Survey
 -- US NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)

Dr David Maidment of the Center for Research in Water Resources, University of Texas at Austin, and leader of CUAHSI, which developed WaterML 1.0, said, “This is the first public, open source, global standard for the exchange of water information through the Internet. It is critical for linking local, regional, national and global water information sources into connected water information networks throughout the earth.”

Australian Bureau of Meteorology Deputy Director ­ Climate and Water, Dr. Dasarath Jayasuriya, welcomed the announcement of WaterML 2.0. "This is a great outcome for the Water Information community. In Australia, WaterML 2.0 will be used to guide development of the second version of the Water Data Transfer Format, which is designed to help the Australian water industry share data to the Bureau. This will enable the Bureau to efficiently ingest and process water data and provide it to the community in a timely manner. Using these standards will significantly improve the quality and comparability of the water data the Bureau publishes," Dr Jayasuriya said.

The WaterML 2.0 Time Series Encoding standard is implemented as an application schema of the OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding Standard version 3.2.1 and encodes hydrologic semantics onto the OGC Observations and Measurements (O&M) model and encoding standards. It is thus compatible with a wide variety of geospatial and sensor web systems. It is the first exchange standard of a suite of information standards being developed by OGC Hydrology Domain Working Group to communicate and standardize services for exchanging hydrologic information.

The OGC Hydrology Domain Working Group is a Joint Working Group of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the OGC, involving hydrological and government agencies, software providers, universities and research organizations from Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA and other countries.

The OGC WaterML 2.0 Part 1: Time Series Encoding Standard document is free and can be downloaded from http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/waterml.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 465 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.

19 September 2012 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has completed the 3D Portrayal Interoperability Experiment (3DPIE). The 3DPIE was designed to test and demonstrate different approaches for service-based 3D visualization using the candidate OGC standards for 3D portrayal: the OGC Web 3D Service (W3DS) and Web View Service (WVS) Interface standards.

Results have been published as an OGC Public Engineering Report (https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=49068). This report will provide the basis for further standardization efforts in service-based 3D portrayal.

The OGC members participating in the 3DPIE worked to identify, test, and further develop technology standards and workflows for spatial data infrastructure that supports rapid visualization of very large and complex 3D geospatial data sets. The objective of the candidate W3DS and the WVS standards is to make it as easy to integrate and visualize 3D urban and landscape models in web applications as it is easy to integrate 2D maps in web applications. The 3DPIE clarified specifics of 3D portrayal services and provided a proof of concept as well as best practices and guidelines for the candidate standards' implementation, integration, and use. The experiments demonstrated the feasibility of 3D portrayal services using massive real-world 3D data, including a complete textured 3D city model of Paris.

New image- and vector-based streaming and visualization methods have been integrated into established software products and research prototypes. By linking various solutions for serving geospatial 3D assets with web and mobile applications using the 3D portrayal services, interoperability was successfully demonstrated. Of particular interest is the Extensible 3D (X3D) Graphics International Standard, which is the open standard for real-time 3D communication developed and administered by the non-profit Web3D Consortium (www.web3d.org). Also, the upcoming HTML5 web standard was addressed by using WebGL and declarative X3DOM technology for directly embedding 3D spatial data in modern web browsers.

Members of the Web3D Consortium worked to help identify key technological issues and develop common integration strategies. Prof. Volker Coors, one of the OGC representatives in the Web3D Consortium, comments: “I was really impressed by the results of the experiment, especially how well OGC services and Web3D technologies complement each other.”

The initiators of the 3DPIE were:
-- Hasso-Plattner-Institut at the University of Potsdam (HPI)*
-- GIScience at the University of Heidelberg*
-- Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research (IGD)*

The other OGC members that participated were:
-- Bitmanagement Software GmbH
-- CACI
-- Institute for Geodesy and Geoinformation Science at Technical University Berlin (IGG)
-- Institut Geographique National (IGN)
-- Laboratoire des Sciences de l’Information et des Systémes (LSIS)
-- Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), representing Web3D Consortium Members as part of the joint partnership agreement between OGC and Web3D Consortium
-- Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VT)

The 3DPIE was jointly managed by Benjamin Hagedorn (HPI), Arne Schilling (GIScience), and Volker Coors (Fraunhofer IGD / HFT Stuttgart).

About the Web3D Consortium:
The Web3D Consortium is a member-driven organization involved in many technical initiatives across the 4D value chain. The Web3D Consortium is a member-funded industry consortium committed to the creation and deployment of open, royalty-free standards that enable the communication of real-time 3D across applications, networks, and XML web services. Web3D works closely with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and has active projects with W3C, OGC, DICOM, IMS, KHRONOS, and MPEG standards-development organizations to maximize market opportunities for its membership. More information on Web3D Consortium membership is available at http://www.web3d.org.

About the OGC:
The OGC is an international consortium of more than 465 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.