From February 17-19, 2021, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), and the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) hosted a joint virtual code sprint. The code sprint served to accelerate the support of open geospatial standards within the developer community. A summary report of the sprint is now available.
Part of the motivation for holding the code sprint was the growing uptake and use of location information across the global developer community. The code sprint brought together developers of Open Standards, Open Source Software, and Proprietary Software, providing a rare opportunity for developers across these communities to focus on common challenges within a short space of time in a shared collaborative environment.
One function of OGC is to operate different Standards Working Groups (SWGs) that have responsibility for designing candidate standards prior to approval by the membership, as well as for making revisions to existing OGC Standards. The sprint objectives for the SWGs were:
- Develop prototype implementations of OGC Standards, including implementations of draft OGC API Standards
- Test the prototype implementations
- Provide feedback to the Editors about what worked and what did not
- Provide feedback on the specification document
OSGeo is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to foster global adoption of open geospatial technology by being an inclusive software foundation devoted to an open philosophy and participatory community driven development. The foundation consists of projects that develop open source software products. The sprint objectives for OSGeo projects were:
- Release new software versions
- Fix open issues
- Develop new features
- Improve documentation, translations
- Develop prototype implementations of OGC Standards
The ASF is an all-volunteer community comprising 813 individual Members and 8,000 Committers on six continents stewarding more than 200 million lines of code, and overseeing more than 350 Apache projects and their communities. The sprint objectives for ASF projects were:
- Improve support of OGC Standards (GeoSPARQL, Filters, etc.)
- Improve visualization capabilities (e.g. maps)
- Improve documentation
- Improve interoperability with other libraries (GeoAPI)
The code sprint facilitated the development and testing of prototype implementations of OGC Standards, including implementations of draft OGC API Standards. Further, the code sprint also enabled the participating developers to provide feedback to the editors of OGC Standards.
The code sprint provided a collaborative environment for OSGeo and ASF developers to fix open issues in products, develop new features, improve documentation, improve interoperability with other libraries/products, and develop prototype implementations of OGC Standards. The code sprint therefore met all of its objectives and achieved its goal of accelerating the support of open geospatial standards within the developer community.
Participants of the code sprint made several recommendations for future innovation work items and things SWGs should consider supporting. The recommendations are listed in the Joint OGC OSGeo ASF Code Sprint 2021 Summary Engineering Report now available from ogc.org. OGC appreciates the collaboration with OSGeo and ASF, as well as the participation of everyone that took part in the code sprint.
