OGC

(Spanish and English versions below)

Spanish version:

"The Computer for 21st Century" does not have a keyboard or a monitor.  Ubiquitous computing is arriving as the Internet of Things (IoT), transparently embedded in everyday devices in your home and in your city.   M. Weiser from Xerox-PARC in 1991 envisioned "tabs" that we would always carry, now people live and sleep with their phones.  Data for connected devices will transform society at a scale even beyond the WWW.  All devices and the data they produce will come with a location using   GPS/GNSS and soon with ubiquitous indoor positioning.

“Location targeting is the holy grail for marketers.” This statement was directed to an entire industry at Mobile World Congress by Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of the world's largest advertising company by revenues. While this may be a revelation of a new reality to some, the geographer reading this might be saying, "Where's Waldo?" The so-called first law of geography from Waldo Tobler is "Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.” This was recently validated by analysis of Wikipedia. More recent research shows a basis for even more ways to exploit this power.

The first ever OGC Nordic Interoperability Day was organized by OGC Nordic Forum together with ULI Geoforum, Sweden's national association for geographic information and GIS [0]. The event took place last week in Stockholm, Sweden and it was a big success, with over 70 participants from the Nordic countries together with guests from abroad. The full day event included presentations from OGC staff and  Nordic OGC members focusing on how to achieve interoperability of Geographic Information systems, services and content using OGC standards.

I attended the second day at the 2012 Air Transportation Information Exchange Conference, at NOAA in Silver Spring (See Nadine's related blog here). The first three talks were focused on semantics. Then my colleague Nadine Alameh gave a rich multimedia overview (70 Mb presentation) about OGC and OGC Web Services activities (OWS). I talked about the semantic work being advanced in OWS.

The OGC is participating this week in ATIEC, the 2012 Air Transportation Information Exchange Conference. The conference is focused on achieving global harmonization through collaboration. It runs from Aug 28 to Aug 30, 2012.

Geonovum, Netherlands has the task to provide better access to geo-information in the public sector. To fulfil this task, we at Geonovum develop and manage the required geo-standards. Of course we base our geo-standards on the international ISO and OGC geo-standards. 

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has issued official corrigenda for the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Core Service Interface Standard and for OGC GML Coverages (GMLCOV) 1.0.1.A corrigendum is issued to correct known deficiencies or schema errors in an existing OGC standard.

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.

A near-real-time maritime operational spatial data service for oil spill and vessel detection
 
In the last decade, national and international public organizations have set up various geospatial services to monitor and understand safety, security and environmental issues. The availability of observation data and information at the right moment and with the right quality is crucial for managing these issues.
 

Linked Data is about enabling computers to search structured information about “things” over the web. The linking methodology is based on the following Semantic Web principles:

1) Things are uniquely identified using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).

2) Use HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) URIs, to make those things accessible by computer programs.

3) The knowledge of things is expressed using the W3C Resource Description Framework (RDF) and queried via SPARQL.

4) Use relationships to other things when providing information about the things.