Jonathan Fath's blog

The mechanisms through which maps are delivered across the Internet have evolved significantly over the past two decades. Advancement of such mechanisms has been driven by a combination of factors. New data formats have emerged, the SWaP-C (size, weight, power, and cost) of devices has improved, and the capabilities of web browsers have been enhanced by improvements brought by HTML5. This means that some of the functionality that web mapping applications could not implement in a standardized way, are now becoming increasingly common.

The first of a two part series, Steve Liang, founder and CTO of SensorUp shares highlights from the OGC Member Meeting Climate Special Session in December, 2021, and the many challenges and opportunities it presents from a data sharing perspective.

Open standards aren’t just about efficiency. They allow organizations across the globe to share information effectively and securely, and can provide much needed security for data. Standards provide governments and industry alike the ability to use tons of data for a range of use cases from citizen science to Defense and Intelligence and disaster relief. 

When it comes to evolving a technology or standard over multiple decades, the struggle is real. As time changes, so do requirements, use cases, and the need for scalability. What was once a centerpiece to a core infrastructure or service can become dated months after the solution’s release. This problem affects all domains and industries, especially when it comes to geospatial, or location information. It often feels like there is no one group of organizations looking at the big picture.

Over the course of the last two decades technology has made incredible strides in both scalability, and accessibility creating a new landscape for innovation. Small businesses became more and more agile, being able to provide competitive services, and partner with big industry and government to deliver major benefits, oftentimes through innovation, and with the recent big boom in location technology, geospatial is not an exception.

Today’s SDIs span across jurisdictions, regions, and communities, and environmental data is a core example of this. As environmental data changes drastically depending on economic, health, and social impacts, analysis of vast amounts of data has become a necessity to help meet key challenges, such as combating climate change and preventing and mitigating the impacts of disasters. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown clear gaps in the global preparedness necessary to face this kind of threat – a threat that disease ecologists expect will likely recur in our lifetime. On the other hand, this pandemic has also highlighted specific opportunities for making the needed improvements. The OGC Health Summit thus brought together global stakeholders and experts to capture those gaps and the geospatial tools poised to address them. Speakers and panelists included leaders in data analytics from the World Health Organization (WHO), government representatives from both large and small US cities, scientists, health systems leaders, and a funding organization. There were five core takeaways to consider as we move to improve global pandemic preparedness.

The last three years have been unprecedented when it comes to disasters. In 2019 alone there was billions of dollars’ worth of damage,  and thousands of fatalities were caused by hundreds of catastrophes ranging from earthquakes to wildfires. To address this decades-long trend of ever larger and deadlier disasters, OGC and the greater location information community work together to showcase how open standards can mitigate damage and loss of life during a critical event and allow quicker, more efficient responses. With interoperability at the core, OGC, industry, government and academia members highlighted how location is everything when protecting populations of the modern world from hurricanes, wildfires, and other disasters.

OGC’s Member Meeting is the center of all things for location information. Happening for almost three decades, the meetings focus on everything from evolving core standards that change the way information is shared, to providing key updates about the OGC Innovation Program, a forum for OGC members to solve the latest and hardest geospatial challenges via a collaborative and agile process. 

The OGC 116th Member Meeting was held virtually from 14–18 September, 2020. Every quarter, OGC Member Meetings highlight all things location, including standards development, innovation initiatives, and new technologies and domains that are powered by geospatial data.