Blogs

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.

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.