Blogs

OGC’s 123rd Member Meeting – our long awaited return to in-person(!) – was held in Madrid, Spain, from June 13-16, 2022. The meeting was sponsored by the EU Satellite Center (SatCen) and recognized the 30th anniversary of SatCen as an organization. More than 150 key standards leaders and regional experts from industry, academia, and government braved the heatwave to attend in person, with another 200+ virtual.

With a focus on The Metaverse/Digital Twins, Climate, and the Marine domain, the Member Meeting also featured the usual assortment of Working Group meetings, as well as special sessions, social events, and all the impromptu conversations, break-aways, sight-seeing, and general interaction that comes with (finally) being in-person again.

As we approach the Developer Workshop at our upcoming Member Meeting, and in light of our very successful Cloud-Native Outreach Event, OGC's Chief Standards Officer, Scott Simmons, has put together an overview of the current state of 'Cloud-Native Geospatial' at OGC, including the relevant Standards and Engineering Reports stemming from our R&D and Innovation work - and what's coming in the future.

OGC, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) held their second joint code sprint in March this year, which introduced several exciting changes not seen during the 2021 Joint Code Sprint. 

Over a period of 3 days, the sprint participants collaborated on a variety of coding and documentation tasks, and held discussions to facilitate coordination. The sprint participants made several recommendations for future innovation work items, outlined in the following blog post.

The metaverse is the internet transformed by real-time 3D technologies, but the impact of real-time 3D is also transforming geospatial. In the metaverse, the real world and the internet will merge – and geospatial information and technology will be key to that combination.

The ‘Metaverse Ad-Hoc Session’ at OGC's 121st Member Meeting in December 2021, saw speakers from across industry - from photogrammetry and AI-enhanced semantic remote sensing companies to geospatial, BIM, and gaming software companies - discuss how geospatial tech will inform the metaverse, how the metaverse will transform geospatial, and why open standards will be critical for the metaverse’s success.

As I embark on my fourth year at OGC, our mission continues to be that of making geospatial information FAIR at scale! And, in 2022, I can’t think of a more scalable (or impactful!) way to do that than via cloud-native geospatial.

No one can deny that ‘the cloud’ is triggering a fundamental shift in how geospatial data is stored, shared, accessed, integrated, and analyzed. Just imagine what we can achieve if we create an open, interoperable foundation for cloud-native geospatial technologies.

Far from being a “sci-fi” tech, Artificial Intelligence (AI) already plays a crucial role in many domains and is revolutionizing existing technologies. International standards will play a pivotal role in ensuring widespread interoperability and security benefits among the various disciplines dealing with AI.

A chat with Kyoung-Sook Kim, co-chair of the OGC Artificial Intelligence in Geoinformatics Domain Working Group (aka the GeoAI DWG), on why standards will benefit AI applications in Geospatial, how a GeoAI DWG will help, and what OGC and its members are doing to help enable the next generation of service innovation.

The OGC Data Access and Processing API (DAPA) - backed by example code for both server & client side software, scripts for cloud deployment & installation, and best practice guides - is a so-called “convenience API” that allows scientists and other geospatial analysts to run several operations on Earth Observation or other data using a single API call, in turn providing the data in a form directly ready for further analysis. 

As such, it takes most of the processing burden away from the user, greatly simplifying Earth Observation data processing and analysis workflows, while also enhancing the reproducibility of scientific analyses.

The first of a two part series, Steve Liang, founder and CTO of SensorUp shares highlights from the OGC Member Meeting Climate Special Session in December, 2021, and the many challenges and opportunities it presents from a data sharing perspective.

From November 15-17, 2021, OGC and ISO/TC 211 jointly hosted the November 2021 Geospatial API Virtual Code Sprint. The code sprint focused on the refinement of the OGC API - Features Standard, and its ISO version ISO 19168, which offers the capability to serve, create, modify, and query spatial data on the Web. As a first for OGC, the Sprint used Discord to handle video, voice, and chat facilities, and additionally offered 'Mentor Streams' to support developers new to OGC API Standards.

This blog post outlines what happened at the Sprint, any lessons learnt, and how it will further refine the OGC API - Features/ISO 19168 Standards.

In his previous post, Chris Holmes laid out the vision for Cloud-Native Geospatial. With this next post, he gets into the details of what is needed, laying out the key areas where foundational standards are needed, and then surveying the current status of each area. 
The existing technologies and Standards range from quite well-established to quite speculative, but all are eminently achievable. Chris then takes a 'deep dive' into the area that he ended up focusing on the most during his time as OGC Visiting Fellow these last few months.