A New Look for the Portrayal of Geospatial Information
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.
Glossaries are easy to set up for simple examples but extremely hard to scale - especially when a project wants to inherit terms from other organizations. Ankita Tripathi and Cameron Shorter explain a new pilot to address cross-domain management of glossaries.
The OGC family has lost a cherished friend and impassioned supporter of the use of location information and open standards for good. We recently learned of Lance McKee’s passing from his daughter Caitlin. He died peacefully at the age of 72 from a chronic illness. His intellect, kindness, and compassion for the OGC vision and mission, and the use of location information to improve our society and environment, has left a deep imprint on the OGC and each of us who had the privilege of knowing him.
Only July 28 and 29, 2020, OGC hosted a virtual sprint to advance the OGC API - Maps candidate standard, one of many APIs being rolled out by the organization to revolutionize how location information is accessed and shared across the industry. Sponsored by Ordnance Survey, participants prototyped implementations of the draft OGC API - Maps - Part 1: Core standard, identifying missing requirements, and documenting these requirements so that the candidate standard could be improved. 
Like so many nations, New Zealand is engaged in a contentious game of environmental tug-of-war. On one side, ecological enthusiasts who want to preserve and protect the country’s lush, otherworldly landscape, which is beloved by visitors and locals alike for its majestic mountains, verdant valleys and bewitching beaches. On the other side, economic opportunists who want to capitalize on the country’s natural resources in order to make New Zealand as productive as it is pretty. Along with arable land and precious mineral deposits, the rope on which Kiwis on both sides are constantly tugging comprises the country’s most valuable commodity: fresh water.
Within the DEMETER project, one pilot is concerned with - and for - the smallest of all commercial livestock: the honeybee. Bees aren’t the first animal that springs to mind when one thinks about livestock and farming. Yet for such tiny creatures, they have a huge impact on sustainable and economical agriculture.
Outlining some important changes relevant to any software implementors that access EPSG Coordinate Reference System (CRS) definitions through the OGC Definitions Server coming next month.
Through the Agriculture Domain Working Group, Horizon 2020 European Commission funded projects such as CYBELE and DEMETER, and other OGC Innovation Program initiatives, OGC supports the development, implementation, and use of open standards and best-practices that maximize interoperability in Smart Agriculture with the aim of keeping humanity fed at a time of unprecedented environmental and cultural change.
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 first of a series of blog posts, Ignacio "Nacho" Correas, Chief Technology Innovation Officer at Skymantics, summarizes Skymantics’ experiences and findings in building an interoperable routing engine using OGC standards. 
