27 October 2014. The OGC membership has adopted the OGC Sensor Observation Service 2.0 Hydrology Profile as an OGC Best Practice.

The OGC Sensor Observation Service (SOS) 2.0 Interface Standard (http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/sos) defines a Web service interface that provides clients with a broad range of capabilities for discovering, gathering, and querying collections of observation data. The new OGC Sensor Observation Service 2.0 Hydrology Profile Best Practice is defined to overcome semantic issues between different SOS instances serving hydrological data and the related client applications. Therefore, this profile focuses on how to specify semantics and structure requests and defines the necessary technical details to implement an interoperable hydrology SOS profile.

The SOS Hydrology Profile was developed and tested in the OGC Hydrology Interoperability Experiments and in the European GEOWOW project (GEOSS interoperability for Weather, Ocean and Water). GEOWOW was co-funded by the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under grant agreement in response to call ENV.2011.4.1.3-1 “Interoperable integration of Shared Earth Observations in the Global Context”.

The following organizations submitted this document to the OGC:

  • 52° North Initiative for Geospatial Open Source Software GmbH
  • KISTERS AG

The OGC® is an international geospatial standards consortium of more than 495 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/.