Blogs

There was a principled and powerful representation in attendance at OGC’s Location Powers event in London last November. Ordnance Survey hosted the event at the Geovation Hub with 23 speakers over two days. Representatives from across finance, transport/logistics, and construction/maintenance markets described their organizations’ approach to Environmental, Social, and (corporate) Governance (ESG) reporting and how it benefits from geospatial technologies. The event highlighted the need for sharing location information easily to many stakeholders.

The mechanisms through which maps are delivered across the Internet have evolved significantly over the past two decades. Advancement of such mechanisms has been driven by a combination of factors. New data formats have emerged, the SWaP-C (size, weight, power, and cost) of devices has improved, and the capabilities of web browsers have been enhanced by improvements brought by HTML5. This means that some of the functionality that web mapping applications could not implement in a standardized way, are now becoming increasingly common.

From October 3-7 ‘22 (and a little bit beforehand), more than 100 experts from across industry, government, and academia converged on the Lifelong Learning Institute in Singapore (with 150 more joining virtually) to strengthen global collaboration and attend OGC’s 124th Member Meeting. A big “thank you” goes out to our dedicated members that either attended in-person, or juggled lives across multiple timezones to attend virtually.

The meeting carried the theme “Digital Twins: Land and Sea,” and was held in conjunction with the Singapore Geospatial Festival operated by GeoWorks. The meeting was sponsored by OGC Principal Member, Singapore Land Authority (SLA), and the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA).

OGC's CTIO Ingo Simonis spent two days last week at the Edge Computing World Conference in California, and observed a number of interesting aspects that he shares here – including how technical terms such as Edge or Cloud are almost becoming meaningless.

Is the concept of the "Edge" already in the process of dissolution? Or do we need to redefine the term to reflect the changed view of the various layers within the Edge-Cloud continuum?

Held in London (and online) on September 14-16, 2022, the second OGC & ISO joint code sprint, nicknamed the The Metadata Code Sprint, served to accelerate the support of open geospatial standards that relate to geospatial metadata and catalogs. 

The discussions during the code sprint covered topics such as harmonization of STAC and OGC API - Records; harvesting of metadata to populate instances of OGC API - Records; the possibility of a JSON-FG encoding for OGC API Records and STAC; the possibility of a JSON encoding of ISO 19115; and others. Demonstrations included client-side and server-side implementations of OGC API - Records, JSON-FG, STAC, and ISO 19115 metadata. 

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.