What is it?  An inter-disciplinary, inter-agency and international virtual observatory system for water resources information from observations and forecasts in the U.S. and Canada, building on current networks and capabilities, designed to support these functions:

 
What is it?  An inter-disciplinary, inter-agency and international virtual observatory system for water resources information from observations and forecasts in the U.S. and Canada, building on current networks and capabilities, designed to support these functions:

• Hydrologic modeling for historical and current stream flow and groundwater conditions.  Requires the integration of trans-boundary stream flow and groundwater well data, as well as national river networks (US NHD and Canada NHN) from multiple agencies.  Emphasis on time series data and real-time flood monitoring.
• Modeling and assessment of nutrient load into the lakes.  Requires accessing water-quality data from multiple agencies and integrating with stream flow information for calculating loads.  Emphasis on discrete sampled water quality observations, linking those to specific NHD stream reaches and catchments, and additional metadata for sampled data. 
• Collection and preservation of provenance, uncertainty measures, and other metadata throughout processing workflows.

Key objectives of these use cases are:

1. To link observations data to the stream network, enabling queries of conditions upstream from a given location to return all relevant gages and well locations. This is currently not practical with the data sources available.
2. To bridge differences in semantics across information models and processes used by the various data producers, to improve the hydrologic and water quality modeling capabilities.

 
Why do it now?  Improved capabilities for sharing, accessing, and integrating hydrologic and climatic data have been identified as a critical need for some time.  We are at a point in time at which an opportunity exists to make large steps forward by leveraging existing resources – including data portals, standards, technologies, activities, and expertise – to develop an initial operational capability for the system described above.  
 
Expected Benefits

• Leverage a large body of existing data holdings and related activities of multiple agencies in the US and Canada.
• Influence data and metadata standards used internationally for web-based information sharing, through multiple agency cooperation and OGC standards setting process.
• Reduction of procurement risk through partnership-based development of an initial operating capability verses ~10x the cost for building a fully operational system using a traditional “waterfall approach”.
• Identification and clarification of what is possible, and of the key technical and non-technical barriers to continued progress in sharing and integrating hydrologic and climatic information.
• Promote understanding and strengthen ties within the hydro-climatic community. This is anticipated to be the first phase of a multi-phase project, with future work on forecasting the hydrologic consequences of extreme weather events, and enabling more sophisticated water quality modeling.

 
Plan

• Release Request for Quotation / Call for Participation (RFQ/CFP)
• Proposals due
• Project Kickoff Meeting, Washington DC area
• Completion of development and engineering reports

 
 

OGC has identified the need for standardized interfaces for sensors in the Web of Things (WoT).  The Sensor Web interface for IoT SWG aims to develop such a standard based on existing WoT portals with consideration of the existing OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards.

The importance of location information and sensor observations to the IoT has been recognized.  Accordingly, OGC conducted several workshops to determine the application of relevant standards to IoT (http://www.ogcnetwork.net/IoT).  A main conclusion of these workshops is contained in this recommendation from the November 2011 workshop:

The Energy & Utilities Domain Working Group will focus on the global energy and utilities community, which is defined as individuals and organizations engaged in the geospatial aspects of the planning, delivery, operations, reliability and ongoing management of electric, gas, oil and water services throughout the world.

OGC standards development process have depended upon communities of interest working to advance standards for improved information sharing, situational awareness and decision making.  OGC’s working group activities, testbeds and pilot initiatives will benefit from being driven by requirements and use cases provided by representatives from the law enforcement, civil security and public safety communities. 

The OGC GeoSPARQL standard supports representing and querying geospatial data on the Semantic Web. GeoSPARQL defines a vocabulary for representing geospatial data in RDF, and it defines an extension to the SPARQL query language for processing geospatial data. In addition, GeoSPARQL is designed to accommodate systems based on qualitative spatial reasoning and systems based on quantitative spatial computations.

Background

Access to the Internet will predominantly be from mobile devices including smart phones and machine-to-machine interactions.  Most information exchanged in mobile internet will include spatial components.  

In support of OGC members and society, this OGC Interoperability Program initiative aims to help develop the consensus standards infrastructure necessary to achieve the full societal, economic and scientific benefits of location information in mobile applications worldwide.

OGC members and the public are invited to participate in this project's activities, which currently includes:

Purpose of this Standards Working Group

The purpose of this IndoorGML Standard Working Group is to develop an application schema of OGC GML and progress the document to the state of an adopted OGC standard. The goal of this candidate standard is to establish a common schema framework for indoor navigation applications. This SWG will start from the discussion paper (OGC 10-191r1, Requirements and Space-Event Modeling for Indoor Navigation), which summarizes the requirements and basic idea of a standard for indoor navigation.

This project is currently in concept development.
 
What is it?  An inter-disciplinary, inter-agency and international virtual observatory system for water resources information from observations and forecasts in the U.S. and Canada, building on current networks and capabilities, designed to support these functions:
This project is currently in concept development.
 

This standard defines a protocol for RS232 and Ethernet connected instruments. PUCK addresses installation and configuration challenges for sensors by defining a standard instrument protocol to store and automatically retrieve metadata and other information from the instrument device itself.

Most sensor networks require careful manual installation and configuration by technicians to assure that software components are properly associated with the physical instruments that they represent. Instrument driver software, configuration files, and metadata describing the instrument and its ...