Simon Chester's blog

OGC’s 123rd Member Meeting – our long awaited return to in-person(!) – was held in Madrid, Spain, from June 13-16, 2022. The meeting was sponsored by the EU Satellite Center (SatCen) and recognized the 30th anniversary of SatCen as an organization. More than 150 key standards leaders and regional experts from industry, academia, and government braved the heatwave to attend in person, with another 200+ virtual.

With a focus on The Metaverse/Digital Twins, Climate, and the Marine domain, the Member Meeting also featured the usual assortment of Working Group meetings, as well as special sessions, social events, and all the impromptu conversations, break-aways, sight-seeing, and general interaction that comes with (finally) being in-person again.

The metaverse is the internet transformed by real-time 3D technologies, but the impact of real-time 3D is also transforming geospatial. In the metaverse, the real world and the internet will merge – and geospatial information and technology will be key to that combination.

The ‘Metaverse Ad-Hoc Session’ at OGC's 121st Member Meeting in December 2021, saw speakers from across industry - from photogrammetry and AI-enhanced semantic remote sensing companies to geospatial, BIM, and gaming software companies - discuss how geospatial tech will inform the metaverse, how the metaverse will transform geospatial, and why open standards will be critical for the metaverse’s success.

Far from being a “sci-fi” tech, Artificial Intelligence (AI) already plays a crucial role in many domains and is revolutionizing existing technologies. International standards will play a pivotal role in ensuring widespread interoperability and security benefits among the various disciplines dealing with AI.

A chat with Kyoung-Sook Kim, co-chair of the OGC Artificial Intelligence in Geoinformatics Domain Working Group (aka the GeoAI DWG), on why standards will benefit AI applications in Geospatial, how a GeoAI DWG will help, and what OGC and its members are doing to help enable the next generation of service innovation.

In his previous post, Chris Holmes laid out the vision for Cloud-Native Geospatial. With this next post, he gets into the details of what is needed, laying out the key areas where foundational standards are needed, and then surveying the current status of each area. 
The existing technologies and Standards range from quite well-established to quite speculative, but all are eminently achievable. Chris then takes a 'deep dive' into the area that he ended up focusing on the most during his time as OGC Visiting Fellow these last few months.

Hexagon’s long-time support of OGC and our Standards, including our family of OGC APIs, has enabled the Company to learn from, collaborate with, and support the broader geospatial community, while also improving their product offering and being one of the first to market with support for the latest generation of geospatial standards.

Simon Chester talked with Stan Tillman, Executive Manager, Hexagon’s Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial Division, about the value that participating in the OGC Community has brought them, including being one of the first to market with support for the new OGC API Standards.

Chris Holmes reflects on his time as OGC's first Visiting Fellow, and outlines his vision of 'Cloud-Native Geospatial' by addressing the question  ‘What would geospatial standards look like if they were built for the cloud?’

Chris has taken the time to look at the entire geospatial landscape and the potential for OGC to play the key leadership role in making the Cloud-Native Geospatial vision a reality. 

14 years after its creation - and at a time when the need for sustainable development is greater than ever - INSPIRE has evolved to continue to provide accessible and interoperable geospatial data to the European community and beyond.

And, thanks to INSPIRE’s growing support of the OGC API Family of standards, stakeholders can access and publish it in a manner that has grown simpler and more useful over time.

The Building Energy Mapping and Analytics Concept Development Study (BEMA-CDS) sought to characterize the state of development of energy mapping and analytics for building stock broadly and to inform IT architectural practices and standards to enable mapping and analytics, specifically of residential energy use and efficiency.  

To complement the recent publication of the detailed report documenting the study, Eddie Oldfield, Jessica Webster, and Ryan Ahola provide here a quick overview of the study and its major findings.

A long-time user and supporter of OGC standards, the Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC), a division of Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), is Canada’s authoritative source for severe-weather alerts and weather, water, ice, and climate data.

One of the nation’s oldest government institutions, MSC is also one to keep up with the times, using the latest technologies in its quest to help Canadians make informed decisions about their health and safety and economic prosperity. One such example is the MSC GeoMet API platform, which, through the use of OGC API and other OGC standards, allows users to freely and quickly access thousands of real-time and archived weather, climate, and water datasets and products and integrate them in their domain-specific applications and decision support systems.

OGC Member Intel recently launched Intel Geospatial, a cloud-based geospatial data management, visualization, and AI platform with applications in asset management across utilities smart cities, energy, and other industries. We sat down (virtually) with Intel Geospatial General Manager, Vijay Krishnan, to discuss AI, the Cloud, and what the future of data integration, visualization, and analysis may look like.