Blogs

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. 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.

The last three years have been unprecedented when it comes to disasters. In 2019 alone there was billions of dollars’ worth of damage,  and thousands of fatalities were caused by hundreds of catastrophes ranging from earthquakes to wildfires. To address this decades-long trend of ever larger and deadlier disasters, OGC and the greater location information community work together to showcase how open standards can mitigate damage and loss of life during a critical event and allow quicker, more efficient responses. With interoperability at the core, OGC, industry, government and academia members highlighted how location is everything when protecting populations of the modern world from hurricanes, wildfires, and other disasters.

OGC’s Member Meeting is the center of all things for location information. Happening for almost three decades, the meetings focus on everything from evolving core standards that change the way information is shared, to providing key updates about the OGC Innovation Program, a forum for OGC members to solve the latest and hardest geospatial challenges via a collaborative and agile process. 

On January 12-14, 2021, OGC held the Location Powers: Urban Digital Twins virtual summit. The summit brought industry, research, and government experts from across the globe together into an interactive discussion that assessed the current “state of the art” of Urban Digital Twins and produced recommendations for future technology research, innovation, and standards development in support of urban digital twins that adhere to the FAIR data principles of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability.  

Since their beginning, the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) specification and OGC API - Features have been evolving together and continually aligning. This post explains the relationship between STAC, OGC API - Features, and OGC itself.

As part of OGC's Open Routing API Pilot, participants developed an API that allowed requests for routes from different users in an interoperable and standardized way via Web protocols. In this second of a series of blog posts, Ignacio "Nacho" Correas, Chief Technology Innovation Officer at Skymantics, offers some tips and best practices for creating an interoperable routing engine.

The OGC 116th Member Meeting was held virtually from 14–18 September, 2020. Every quarter, OGC Member Meetings highlight all things location, including standards development, innovation initiatives, and new technologies and domains that are powered by geospatial data.

http://www.sensorup.com
Sensor technology has changed drastically over the last decade. Asset-intensive industries such as mining, distribution, and oil & gas use a large variety of sensing systems to monitor and optimize the efficiency of their operations. However, with so many different sensor types, vendors, and capabilities available on the market, this abundance of sensor data has resulted in data silos that, ironically, impede efficiency. As such, industry players are looking for ways to seamlessly and effortlessly aggregate this data so that its true value can be realized.

Together, the Open Portrayal Framework and the SymCore standard define a modern and modular approach to portrayal based on the intent to have many extensions from a common conceptual model and many encodings of those extensions. With this approach, a common symbology definition can be implemented in multiple encodings and easily shared by multiple clients to provide similar visualization effects to different users. The OPF helps to define a seamless online and offline experience that incorporates emerging OGC APIs for enhanced sharing of features and coverage data, images, and tiles for networked users and GeoPackages for disadvantaged and disconnected users.

As part of our 116th OGC Member Meeting during the week of September 14, 2020, OGC dedicated a session to discuss the topic of GeoEthics and the role of OGC - as a consortium and as a community of global experts. The session was part of OGC’s regular Future Directions programming, led by Dr. Gobe Hobona, and a panel moderated by OGC’s CEO Dr. Nadine Alameh, with participation from a number of OGC members.