Blogs

Hexagon’s long-time support of OGC and our Standards, including our family of OGC APIs, has enabled the Company to learn from, collaborate with, and support the broader geospatial community, while also improving their product offering and being one of the first to market with support for the latest generation of geospatial standards.

Simon Chester talked with Stan Tillman, Executive Manager, Hexagon’s Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial Division, about the value that participating in the OGC Community has brought them, including being one of the first to market with support for the new OGC API Standards.

Chris Holmes reflects on his time as OGC's first Visiting Fellow, and outlines his vision of 'Cloud-Native Geospatial' by addressing the question  ‘What would geospatial standards look like if they were built for the cloud?’

Chris has taken the time to look at the entire geospatial landscape and the potential for OGC to play the key leadership role in making the Cloud-Native Geospatial vision a reality. 

14 years after its creation - and at a time when the need for sustainable development is greater than ever - INSPIRE has evolved to continue to provide accessible and interoperable geospatial data to the European community and beyond.

And, thanks to INSPIRE’s growing support of the OGC API Family of standards, stakeholders can access and publish it in a manner that has grown simpler and more useful over time.

Open standards aren’t just about efficiency. They allow organizations across the globe to share information effectively and securely, and can provide much needed security for data. Standards provide governments and industry alike the ability to use tons of data for a range of use cases from citizen science to Defense and Intelligence and disaster relief. 

The Building Energy Mapping and Analytics Concept Development Study (BEMA-CDS) sought to characterize the state of development of energy mapping and analytics for building stock broadly and to inform IT architectural practices and standards to enable mapping and analytics, specifically of residential energy use and efficiency.  

To complement the recent publication of the detailed report documenting the study, Eddie Oldfield, Jessica Webster, and Ryan Ahola provide here a quick overview of the study and its major findings.

In late April 2021, OGC and GEO ran the 'Towards Data Cube Interoperability' workshop, which invited data cube experts from across the globe. Results from the workshop underscored the need for a ‘user centric’ API-based approach to accessing data cubes that exposes not only the data available to the user, but also the processing algorithms that can be run on it - and allow the user to add their own.

With the recent release of the Workshop Report, this blog post serves to provide an overview of some of the outcomes from the day, as well as provide a look towards OGC's path to data cube interoperability.

At the Eleventh Session of the United Nations Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM) Committee of Experts, member nations endorsed a key revision of the UN-GGIM Guide to the Role of Standards in Geospatial Information Management. Happening in late August 2021, the goal of the Guide is to “provide detailed insights on the standards and good practices necessary to establish and maintain geospatial information management systems that are compatible and interoperable with other systems within and across organizations. The Guide also underscores the importance of standards in facilitating the application of the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data principles - promoting improved policymaking, decision making and government effectiveness in addressing key social, economic, and environmental topics, including attainment of Sustainable Development Goals”.

Powering solutions that address global problems is one of the drivers behind OGC’s efforts to simplify data integration, and New Space, as an emerging domain, is simultaneously offering exciting solutions while creating integration challenges. The topic remains a point of discussion across the location community, as well as at OGC Member Meetings, often revealing many questions.

A long-time user and supporter of OGC standards, the Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC), a division of Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), is Canada’s authoritative source for severe-weather alerts and weather, water, ice, and climate data.

One of the nation’s oldest government institutions, MSC is also one to keep up with the times, using the latest technologies in its quest to help Canadians make informed decisions about their health and safety and economic prosperity. One such example is the MSC GeoMet API platform, which, through the use of OGC API and other OGC standards, allows users to freely and quickly access thousands of real-time and archived weather, climate, and water datasets and products and integrate them in their domain-specific applications and decision support systems.

APIs have proven to be a popular and very effective enabler of rapid software development. This is more so in web mapping, where a combination of cartographic and software development skills is often needed to create maps for a global user base. As part of OGC’s on-going development of the OGC API suite of standards, OGC has been holding a series of Code Sprints. As part of this series, the May 2021 OGC API Virtual Code Sprint was conducted May 26–28, 2021.

With Ordnance Survey (OS) as Gold-level Sponsor and Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) as Silver-level Sponsor, the code sprint sought to progress the development of the draft OGC API standards for Maps, Tiles, and Styles. The sprint also sought to identify issues as well as options for addressing them.