Blogs

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.

The OGC is invited to provide speakers at hundreds of events worldwide. We support events in areas that are relevant to member interests and areas where OGC’s open standards can add value. Two such targeted and focused events will take place in the next 3 months. The first event is the Eye on Earth Summit & Exhibition 2011, 12-15 December 2011 at ADNEC in Abu Dhabi www.eyeonearthsummit.org. The second is Defence Geospatial Intelligence (DGI) 2012, 23-26 January

 
 
There's a debate in the geo blogosphere about "Big Data" versus spatial data infrastructure (SDI), that is, deriving information from searches of unstructured data versus deriving information from structured data. 
 

Last week I had the pleasure of joining my colleague Athina Trakas and about 20,000 others at Intergeo 2011, one of the largest geospatial conferences in the world [http://www.tradefairdates.com/Intergeo-M5482/Nuremberg.html]. During the course of the week it struck us that there was very little time dedicated to open geospatial standards, so we spent some time with the organisers discussing some possibilities for Intergeo 2012 in Hanover, Germany.

CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) is Australia's national science agency and one of the largest and most diverse research agencies in the world. David Lemon, Stream Leader - Water Informatics in CSIRO Land and Water, is Co-chair of the OGC Hydrology Domain Working Group along with Ilya Zaslavsky (San Diego Supercomputing Center – SDSC in the USA) and Ulrich Looser (Global Runoff Data Centre – GRDC at Germany's Federal Institute of Hydrology). I asked David a few questions about CSIRO's long-time involvement in the OGC.

The level of interest and activity around open geospatial standards has been steadily increasing over recent years and as such, I’m happy to be in a position to introduce the OGC blog. Our plan is to use this blog to augment the frequency and broaden the range of topics previously covered in the OGC Newsletter. In addition to comments and opinion from OGC staff, there will be blog posts from OGC members and guests. There is also a new home page for the OGC public website where you can learn about different communities of interest that are active in the OGC.