Blogs

Friday the 14th February 2020 was my last day with OGC as an employee, completing a transition plan that I initiated in March 2018 when I notified the OGC Board of Directors of my intent to retire. Going forward, I plan to provide my support to the Consortium on occasion as a consultant to address specific OGC mission topics. I will also remain connected with the geospatial community through my involvement in activities such as the US National Geospatial Advisory Committee. I am also looking forward to spending much more time with family and the pursuit of a few new opportunities - including helping build computers for the less forunate, as well as good amount of fishing and time spent enjoying the Atlantic coast.

A joint OGC / ESIP Coverage and Processing Analytics API development sprint was held on January 6-7, 2020. The Sprint was held in conjunction with the ESIP Winter Meeting. This sprint builds on the OGC API Hackathon in June 2019, and the OGC API Features and Catalogues Sprint in November 2019. The ESIP/OGC sprint focused on OGC API-Coverages, API-Processes, and API-Common as part of the overall development of OGC APIs.

On this #GeoPackageDay 2020 - the 6th anniversary of the format - Jeff Yutzler (GeoPackage SWG Chair) discusses some of the benefits of this portable, extensible, efficient, online/offline container format for geospatial information and maps.

As part of the GeoSmart India event in Hyderabad, India, last December, Dr. M.K. Munshi organised an OGC India Forum meeting. The forum theme centered around the integration of smart systems into national development and government goals through the use of open standards, innovation processes, and partnerships.

Luis Bermudez, our Executive Director of the Innovation Program, will be leaving OGC staff on December 31, 2019. After 10 years of fantastic service to the company, our members, and the wider geospatial community, Luis is moving to a leadership role with a respected OGC member.

Back in August I published a Q2 2019 update on OGC’s Tech Trends status. This post serves to update what’s changed in the months since its publication.

For the 4th quarter of 2019, these emerging trends were the focus of more attention: Commodity remote sensing and Smallsats; 3D Model Creation; Precise Positioning, and; Spatial Analytics in Python & R. 

Read on to find out how these trends (and more) are impacting the geospatial industry, and how OGC is handling their emergence.

From 18-12 November, 2019, around 180 OGC Members from across the globe attend our 113th Technical Committee (TC) Meeting at the Toulouse Evénements Centre de Congrès Pierre Baudis in Toulouse, France. 

Special sessions were held for the Europe Forum, an Augmented Reality Summit, an ad hoc meeting with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on transportation topics, an "OGC Value" working session, meetings of the joint OGC-W3C Spatial Data on the Web Subcommittee, as well as the joint OGC-ISO/TC 211 work on Observations and Measurements. Finally, there was also the presentation of the CityGML v3 visualization tool developed by the winners of the 2019 CityGML Challenge, Claus Nagel and Thomas Adolphi of virtualcitySYSTEMS.

Communicating research outputs to scientists, public and private sector administrators, and citizens regarding various real-world phenomena using dynamic, interactive, and understandable visual interfaces is essential for effective decision-making.

The URBAN GEOmatics for Bulk Information Generation, Data Assessment and Technology Awareness (URBAN GEO BIG DATA) is a 3D visualization project built on OGC Standards and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS.).

Another memorable Technical Committee (TC) Meeting (our 112th) was held in September, this time at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Banff, Canada. The setting was, to say the least, spectacular. The meeting saw 130 attendees with key standards leaders and regional experts from industry, academia, and government getting together to exchange ideas, share expertise, and, of course, get to know each other a little better.

Special sessions were held for Sharing Data in Agriculture, the Canada Forum and the Business Value Committee. There was also a SensorThings and Internet of Things (IoT) Summit. Ad hoc meetings were held to consider creating Standards Working Groups (SWGs) for OGC API – Catalogue as well as an Environmental Data Pattern Retrieval API standard.

It is said that timing is everything in life, love and technical innovation.

I am reminded of that truism as the GEOINT community evaluates the state of its analytic tradecraft readiness in the context of the Fourth Generation of Intelligence. An era marked by widely divergent threats, converging information systems, persistent GEOINT leveraging multi-INT sources and the adoption of new analytical methods such as Activity Based Intelligence (ABI) and Object Based Production (OBP). In parallel with these advances in tradecraft, the geospatial Modeling and Simulation (M&S) community is pressing forward with its own new requirements from the Special Operations Forces (SOF) to deliver real-world 3D geo-specific terrain databases compatible with gaming systems technology.