Blogs

Last month, OGC, Ordnance Survey, the European Space Agency, and NGA held a hackathon in London aiming to advance OGC APIs. 

It is envisaged that the output of the hackathon will be instrumental to the evolution of OGC web service standards to a modern API-based approach, setting the course for open geospatial standards for the next decade. The output should lead to a solid, common core and advancement of a whole new generation of OGC standards that are flexible in modern IT environments. This does not mean that existing OGC web service standards will fade away. Instead, it means that a new suite of OGC standards will give developers and users the option of leveraging capabilities offered by Web APIs.

The recent 111th OGC Technical Committee (TC) Meeting was one of our biggest, with more than 280 people attending, including key standards leaders and regional experts from industry, academia, and government. The Meeting was held at the House of the Province of Vlaams-Brabant in Leuven, Belgium from 24–27 June, 2019, and was sponsored by KU Leuven, Hexagon, Informatie Vlaanderen, and Merkator.

In addition to the many Working Group meetings, this TC Meeting featured an Earth Observation (EO) Summit, a special Sharing Data in Agriculture Session, special sessions on Innovation Program activities in Europe, as well as two social events held across two beautiful local venues.

During the recent TC Meeting in Leuven, Belgium, the Spatial Applications Division of the KU Leuven (SADL) organised the first Earth Observation Summit (EO-Summit) supported by EO4GEO and OGC. The summit aimed to help bridge the skills gap seen in the Earth Observation/Geographic Information (EO/GI) sector.

Discovery is an art, at least if the desired object is more complex than a simple blog web-page such as this one. Here we are talking about discovery of Earth Observation (EO) products, services providing on-demand processing capabilities, and applications that are not deployed yet but waiting in an application store for their ad-hoc deployment and execution. 

Instead of processing ever-increasing amounts of data locally, these applications are transferred to where the data resides. But how to discover these applications? How to understand what data an application can be applied to? How to chain applications? How to combine applications with already deployed services that provide data and data processing capabilities? All these aspects are now in focus of OGC Testbed-15.

By now many of you have heard about new OGC standards in work that leverage OpenAPI and are being characterized as anything from evolutionary to revolutionary. I’d like to give you a few minutes’ read to explain these exciting developments in OGC.

Spreading the word about OGC and growing a more diverse yet connected global community of enthusiasts is one of the reasons I took on my new job as the CEO of OGC. I won’t use this blog to bore you with the details of my educational background and professional experience (you can find those easily on LinkedIn), instead let’s focus on a few things, starting with 'Kicking off the next 25 years of OGC.'

Derek Van Der Kamp, Environment and Climate Change Canada, and Tom Kralidis, Meteorological Service of Canada, provide an overview of the Canadian Centre for Climate Services' use of OGC Web Services to provide 9 climate datasets from Environment and Climate Change Canada. An important factor of success in supplying this data is the use of international standards, which ensure the interoperability of information and data access across a wide range of networked data processing systems.

During the recent OGC TC Meetings in Singapore, the OGC Marine Domain Working Group, in close cooperation with the International Hydrographic Organisation (IHO) and Singapore’s Maritime and Ports Authority of Singapore (MPA), organised the first OGC Marine Summit.
The purpose of the Summit was to: promote the value of interoperability and discoverability of marine spatial data (and MSDI); create awareness of data standards and applications applicable to marine data acquisition and use; explore the uses, challenges, and cutting-edge applications for geospatial data in the marine domain; and further the development of marine standards in both hydrographic and broader, non-hydrographic fields (e.g. ecology, energy, tourism, geology).

Trevor Taylor, Director, Member Services - Asia & the Americas, takes readers through all the exciting happenings from the recent OGC TC Meetings held in Singapore. The meeting was hosted by NUS, sponsored by the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) and the Maritime and Ports Authority of Singapore (MPA), and included a special Monday evening reception sponsored by the UK Ordnance Survey. In addition to the many Working Group meetings, this TC Meeting featured OGC's First Marine Summit and an Integrated Digital Built Environment (IDBE) Summit, as well as a meeting of the OGC Asia Forum.

OGC’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) is responsible for developing OGC’s Technology Strategy and coordinating the strategy across all programs of the Consortium. Currently the main activities of the strategy relate to the OGC Architecture Board (OAB), OGC Technology Forecasting, and the evolution of the OGC Baseline. This column provides an update on those and related activities from the past three months.