Urban Digital Twins - Planning the Cities of Tomorrow
On January 12-14, 2021, OGC held the Location Powers: Urban Digital Twins virtual summit. The summit brought industry, research, and government experts from across the globe together into an interactive discussion that assessed the current “state of the art” of Urban Digital Twins and produced recommendations for future technology research, innovation, and standards development in support of urban digital twins that adhere to the FAIR data principles of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability.
Since their beginning, the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) specification and OGC API - Features have been evolving together and continually aligning. This post explains the relationship between STAC, OGC API - Features, and OGC itself.
As part of OGC's Open Routing API Pilot, participants developed an API that allowed requests for routes from different users in an interoperable and standardized way via Web protocols. In this second of a series of blog posts, Ignacio "Nacho" Correas, Chief Technology Innovation Officer at Skymantics, offers some tips and best practices for creating an interoperable routing engine.
Together, the Open Portrayal Framework and the SymCore standard define a modern and modular approach to portrayal based on the intent to have many extensions from a common conceptual model and many encodings of those extensions. With this approach, a common symbology definition can be implemented in multiple encodings and easily shared by multiple clients to provide similar visualization effects to different users. The OPF helps to define a seamless online and offline experience that incorporates emerging OGC APIs for enhanced sharing of features and coverage data, images, and tiles for networked users and GeoPackages for disadvantaged and disconnected users.
Glossaries are easy to set up for simple examples but extremely hard to scale - especially when a project wants to inherit terms from other organizations. Ankita Tripathi and Cameron Shorter explain a new pilot to address cross-domain management of glossaries.
The OGC family has lost a cherished friend and impassioned supporter of the use of location information and open standards for good. We recently learned of Lance McKee’s passing from his daughter Caitlin. He died peacefully at the age of 72 from a chronic illness. His intellect, kindness, and compassion for the OGC vision and mission, and the use of location information to improve our society and environment, has left a deep imprint on the OGC and each of us who had the privilege of knowing him.
The sheer volume of complex 3D data now available has created challenges concerning access, processing, visualization, and dissemination. Challenges that Cesium believes can only be addressed by engaging with and supporting a community of collaboration and a diverse, interoperable software ecosystem powered by consensus-based open standards.
Another step towards the creation of the OGC Environmental Data Retrieval (EDR) API Standard has been completed: the successful testing of some of the API’s capabilities during the OGC Environmental Data Retrieval API Sprint. The virtual event was held from March 18-20, 2020. A final report detailing the EDR API Sprint is now available on GitHub.
Diversity, as a topic, has frequently appeared on the agendas of industry events for years now. OGC is conscious that there is still much work to be done to increase diversity and inclusion, but, with last Sunday being International Women’s Day, we’re taking the opportunity to reflect upon and highlight some of the activities that OGC staff have been involved in with regard to the issues that women still face in the spatial and related industries - while also remaining aware that diversity is much more than just gender equality.
