Simon Chester's blog

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.

Contributors are coming from the tech writing community, OGC, ISO/TC 211 Terminology Maintenance Group (TMG), and OSGeo projects. Hopefully, OGC members will stand up to glossaries too.

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.

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 first of a series of blog posts, Ignacio "Nacho" Correas, Chief Technology Innovation Officer at Skymantics, summarizes Skymantics’ experiences and findings in building an interoperable routing engine using OGC standards. 

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.

But what is the upcoming EDR API? And how does it improve and simplify access to 'big data'?

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.

Being open, diverse, inclusive, and accessible are parts of OGC’s core values. As such, OGC has long been a champion for diversity in the industry. Over the years, OGC Staff have participated in a variety of meetings, sessions, and panel discussions organised at industry events by organizations such as the Women in Geospatial+ and GeoChicas networks, among others.

To this end, two “Ideathons” were organized to link the national ambitions with the local interest in successfully adapting their urban settings to changing demographics. The first Ideathon was held 3–4 October, 2019, in Chino City, Nagano Prefecture, Japan with more than 20 participants discussing requirements for, and uses of, the Urban Planning ADE.

But things got really exciting from 12–14 February, 2020, when the second Ideathon was held. More than 310 people in total attended this Ideathon to share their experiences in use of the Urban Planning ADE, OGC KML, and citizen engagement. Participants discussed how to use Urban Planning ADE based on various cases and confirmed its effectiveness from the perspectives of land use, disaster prevention, and co-creation of urban plans with citizens.

A joint OGC / ESIP Coverage and Processing Analytics API development sprint was held on January 6-7, 2020. The Sprint was held in conjunction with the ESIP Winter Meeting. This sprint builds on the OGC API Hackathon in June 2019, and the OGC API Features and Catalogues Sprint in November 2019. The ESIP/OGC sprint focused on OGC API-Coverages, API-Processes, and API-Common as part of the overall development of OGC APIs.

On this #GeoPackageDay 2020 - the 6th anniversary of the format - Jeff Yutzler (GeoPackage SWG Chair) discusses some of the benefits of this portable, extensible, efficient, online/offline container format for geospatial information and maps.