“How’s the weather up there?” OGC APIs deliver real-time and archived weather, climate, and water datasets for Canada
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.
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.
