April 22, 2009, Wayland, Massachusetts. The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC(R)) announces the formation of Domain Working Groups (DWG) for Hydrology (http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/hydrologydwg ) and Meteorology (http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/meteodwg ).
The OGC’s standards are enabling a new degree of interoperability within and between the hydrology and meteorology communities. The focus now is to leverage these DWG’s to further advance interoperability solutions to benefit these disciplines, which have increasing importance globally in science, policy and decision support.
The Hydrology Domain Working Group brings together experts from this community of interest to develop and promote standards, interoperability and best practices for improving the way in which water information is described and shared. This working group is to be hosted by the OGC and co-chaired by a representative from the World Meteorological Organisation’s (WMO) Commission for Hydrology (CHy) (http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/hwrp/chy/chy_index.html ).
The purpose of the OGC Meteorology DWG is to provide an open forum for work on meteorological data interoperability, and a route to publication through OGC's standards process (Discussion paper / Best Practice / Standard, and, if appropriate, to ISO status). The goal is to develop standards that meet the specific needs of the World Meteorological Organization (http://www.wmo.int/pages/index_en.html ) and benefit the world weather, water and climate data users and producers.
The OGC’s current standards are enabling a new degree of interoperability within and between the hydrology and meteorology communities. The focus now is to leverage these working groups to further advance interoperability solutions to benefit these disciplines, which have increasing importance in the world scientifically and politically.
David Maidment, Director, Center for Research in Water Resources University of Texas at Austin and leader of the CUAHSI (Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc) project on Hydrologic Information Systems, said, “I am most happy to see this collaboration between OGC and WMO to foster web services standards for the hydrology community.”
Chris Little from the UK Met Office, Co-Chair of the Meteorology Domain Working Group, who has been involved in standards for operational meteorology throughout his career, said: “I welcome this practical collaboration to improve meteorological and geospatial standards and services globally. Also, the WMO Commission for Basic Systems, which has just met, has agreed to pursue a formal Memorandum of Understanding with OGC.”
An OGC Domain Working Group (DWG) provides a forum for discussion of key interoperability requirements and issues, discussion and review of specifications, and presentations on key technology areas relevant to solving its members’ geospatial interoperability issues.
The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 380 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OpenGIS® Standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/.
“
