Blogs

The PolarHub team at the Arizona State University has launched a large-scale web crawler, PolarHub 1.0, to support the intelligent perception and discovery of distributed OGC web services on the ever-expanding World Wide Web. PolarHub introduces innovative web mining techniques to enable a scalable, sustainable, collaborative, and interactive platform for active discovery of OGC web services. As we are entering the era of big (geo) data, PolarHub becomes a new "surfboard" on this data deluge to support insightful geospatial data acquisition and analytics.

ILAF, the OGC Iberian and Latin-American Forum, was chartered in 2010 and it has been a vital channel for communication between the OGC and the Spanish-speaking world.

The Forum is run by two chair persons from Spain, Joan Maso and Joan Capdevilla, both have been active over the last years and helped spread the word about the use of OGC standards in the community. Joan Capdevilla is now stepping down as co-chair because he is changing jobs.

Dear OGC members and readers of our blog,

We lost a member of our OGC family over this past weekend.  Doug Nebert, an active member of the OGC Technical Committee and Planning Committee since 1994, died in a private plane crash in Oregon last weekend.  Our hearts go out to Doug's family at this time of terrible tragedy. 

Doug Nebert

In April, Mike Botts, Botts Innovative Research, Inc. posed a deceptively simple question to an OGC discussion list:  “How does one find existing services that implement OGC Web Map Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS), and Web Coverage Service (WCS) interface standards these days?”   In response to such a fundamental question came an outpouring of responses on the many ways to find OGC services. How many services do you think were identified?  

KML is an XML language focused on geographic visualization, including annotation of maps and images. KML is supported in numerous earth browser applications and geospatial software products. About 70 KML 2.2 implementations are registered in the OGC implementations database.

Nadine Alameh is leaving the OGC staff on April 30, 2014 - today -  to take on a new and exciting opportunity.  We wish her great success and want to thank her for her years of contributions on OGC staff.

The DARPA Transformative Apps program, or TransApps, is developing a diverse array of militarily-relevant software apps using an innovative new development and acquisition process.  A military apps marketplace will be created to enable rapid innovation to meet user needs based on a direct collaboration between a vibrant and highly competitive development community and involved communities of end-users.  The objectives are to transition the resulting systems to end-users in the Services and to foster a new model for rapidly and effectively acquiring, introducing, maintaining and enhancing

The Global Atlas is the largest initiative ever undertaken to assess renewable energy potential on a global scale. See the Global Atlas video. 

As we celebrate OGC’s 20 year anniversary, with great sadness we learned that Cliff Kottman passed on Wednesday 26 March 2014 after a long illness. Cliff was brilliant, creative, deeply analytic and just as wise and sensitive to others as he was smart. He was a great teacher. Even before the OGC came into existence, he contributed to the development of the OGC vision, and he had the ability to put the rather complex vision of geospatial interoperability in easy to understand terms.  Those who remember Cliff may recall his many white papers on the subject and his famous

Last week's GeoPackage Webinar, produced by Directions Media, drew 940 registrants, and 406 of these attended live. In a questionnaire, most of the registered geospatial information managers, developers and practitioners surveyed reported that they plan to use software that implements the OGC GeoPackage Standard that was first announced last month.