Next week the OGC is supporting the India Geospatial Forum (IGF 2012) at the Epicentre in Gurgaon, India. During this important event, there will be an OGC India Forum meeting on Thursday 9 February, morning till lunch. As Chair of this forum, it is my pleasure to invite all geospatial professionals to attend this meeting.
There are several projects underway or already committed in the OGC related to water resources information systems, and because of the widespread and international nature of these activities it seems like a good time for a general update.
Gazetteers provide valuable information about geospatial features, including their names, locations, and feature types. In fact, geographic names are the most common form of locational reference and are key to accessing, linking, and mapping other online information. Since this resource is so important, there's growing interest in sharing and updating geographic names across standard Web services interfaces. To meet this challenge OGC members have developed an updated approach for sharing geographic names - the OGC Gazetteer Service Best Practice.
If I were presented with an opportunity to choose my top 3 events with geospatial significance, the Eye on Earth Summit and Exhibition Abu Dhabi would be on the list. In terms of prominent speakers, useful content, business networking, amazing choreography and inspiration, this event had it all.
In last week's OGC TC meeting in Brussels, I gave a talk in the Mass Market Domain Working Group which mentioned funding that our project received from the Taiwan government, collaborations with Ushahidi and Sahana, and the Samoa Cyclone Simulation. Here is the presentation (19.6MB).
Next week a global event is taking place in the Middle East, specifically in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. It’s called the Eye on Earth Abu Dhabi 2011 Summit and Exhibition and it takes place at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre (ADNEC) from 12th to 15th December. The goal is to bring together world experts to facilitate greater access to environmental and societal data to help achieve sustainable development especially for emerging economies.
As part of my involvement in the SSSC 2011 international conference in Wellington, New Zealand I ran a workshop on Open Standards, Policy and Business Value, which was sponsored by e-Spatial New Zealand Ltd. Attendees came from both government and the private sector and they contributed to the development of the workshop, which will be delivered at other international conferences in coming years. The workshop will also be refined in line with activities of the OGC Business Value Committee.
I have just had the privilege of presenting at the United Nations High Level Forum on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN GGIM).
Professor Tien-Yin (Jimmy) Chou, Director of GIS Research Center of Feng Chia University (GIS.FCU), helped establish the OGC Asia Forum in 2011. He invites professionals and scholars from government units, academic institutions and companies in Asian countries to join this regional forum to promote policies, co-operative business development initiatives and public/private partnerships that support the use of OGC standards. The Asia Forum helps coordinate the efforts of Asian countries to develop regional OGC best practices.
There seems to be some confusion as to how OGC Change Requests (CRs) are processed and how quickly the process takes, so here’s some useful information.
Apologies in advance for the length of this posting!
In early 2009, the OGC Members approved a change in policy with regard to how change requests to existing OGC standards would be processed:
• Only official Change Requests would be considered. The Members felt that a formal CR submission and tracking process was required to strengthen standards revision life cycle maintenance and configuration management.
