Blogs

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.

The Open Portrayal Framework in OGC Testbed 15 is developing a conceptual model for styles together with a series of new APIs for styles, images, maps and tiles handling.
In the Open Portrayal Framework, a style is an encoding with essential information about itself, e.g. title, abstract description of the style, a thumbnail, and information about the data it can be applied to. These metadata elements allow users to share, discover, select, and apply a style. A style further contains a sequence of rules or instructions that define how mapping engines shall render vector or raster data or, in OGC speak, features and coverages.

As ApacheCon North America approaches, the ApacheCon team invited George Percivall to discuss OGC’s exciting highlights for the Geospatial Software Track at the 2019 event, to be held 9-12 September in Las Vegas. 

This CTO Update describes technological advances in the previous quarter with a focus on how these advances support the OGC Tech Strategy.

For the 2nd quarter of 2019, these emerging trends were the focus of more attention:
Data Science and Analytics; UAVs and Drones; Edge and Fog Computing; Web of Data (Linked Data, Property Graphs); Digital Twins (Static and Dynamic); and Modeling, Simulation, and Prediction.

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.