Blogs

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.

Did you know that OGC standards are incorporated in various elements of the information management workflow in the aviation domain? Indeed, EVERYTHING in the aviation domain is related to location: airport maps, weather forecasts, flight paths, airspace extents, obstacles, and - more recently - drones! Not only is the location aspect of all these elements represented using OGC standards or best practices, but some of our standards have been profiled/extended to accommodate for the unique aviation domain requirements. 

Read on to find out more about how OGC standards are used in the aviation domain (including being incorporated into procurement language at ANSPs and international guidance), and more importantly how to get engaged in that evolving work. 

OGC Health Domain Working Group Chair, Ajay K Gupta, discusses the merits of a Health Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) ahead of the publication of OGC's White Paper on the topic. 

For much time now, the OGC Health DWG has been working on a white paper to communicate to the health and geospatial communities the value that a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) can bring to healthcare – and to encourage the development of such a resource for the global community - as SDI can be a platform to aid efforts to achieve healthcare’s twin goals of improving quality while reducing costs.

The OGC Engineering Report OGC 19-003: Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) Compute Challenge has now been published using the information gained from the Earth System Grid Federation extension to OGC Testbed-14, which successfully concluded in June, 2019. 

The T-14 ESGF extension demonstrated impressively how the ‘applications to the data’ architecture, developed in Testbed-13 and Testbed-14, is applicable to climate simulation data processing and analysis. The architecture builds on Web Processing Service profiles and metadata models to allow application developers to make their applications available to the community via Docker containers.

The 9th session of the United Nations Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM) was held at the UN headquarters in New York on the 7th-9th of August. ISO/TC 211, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), and the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) participate jointly as Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) supporting the Committee. Led by United Nations Member States, UN-GGIM aims to address global challenges regarding the use of geospatial information. Much focus is now on developing an Integrated Geospatial Information Framework (IGIF) that Member States can use to develop and enhance their own geospatial management, capabilities, and programs.

Current web-mapping implementations are compromising datum modernisation programs by introducing metre-level misalignments of data. It is the start of a suite of high-accuracy and time-dependent mapping challenges the world is about to face.

While web-mapping has worked ‘well enough’ to date, it cannot support the high-accuracy requirements expected by modern users and data. It is hampered by the ambiguity inherent in the practical application of WGS84 as used by the Web Mercator projection, and lack of care with the recording and use of time metadata.

Your input is requested to help reach a solution.