The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is excited to announce the formation of the OGC GeoParquet Standards Working Group (SWG). The new SWG will work to advance the GeoParquet encoding format for adoption as an OGC Encoding Standard for cloud-native vector data.
GeoParquet adds geospatial types to Apache Parquet, described by Apache as “an open source, column-oriented data file format designed for efficient data storage and retrieval. It provides efficient data compression and encoding schemes with enhanced performance to handle complex data in bulk.” For an introduction to the GeoParquet format, see this blog post.
GeoParquet started over 3 years ago as a community effort by different Open Source Projects and organizations that have committed to its implementation and support.
OGC is advancing a number of Standards to enable cloud-native geospatial ecosystems. GeoParquet fits in the group of data encoding Standards that are highly performant for large, cloud-based data stores, such as Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF for tiled rasters and Zarr for datacubes. GeoParquet will, in time, enable vector datasets to be as readily accessible from the cloud as the other formats already well-used in the community.
The GeoParquet SWG will take the initial efforts incubated in OGC’s GeoParquet GitHub repository as a draft specification from which a candidate Standard will be developed. As with many other recent OGC Standards, the repository will remain open to contributions from outside OGC and documentation will evolve in concert with prototype implementations.
GeoParquet will be another encoding of the OGC Simple Features Standard, and as such will handle all Simple Feature geometries. While other OGC Standards also encode Simple Features, GeoParquet is intended to be optimized for native use in cloud environments. It is expected that GeoParquet will be tested as an encoding to be accessed by the OGC API family of Standards. The new SWG expects to have a candidate Standard ready for review and approval within one year.
The OGC GeoParquet Standards Working Group Charter is publicly available via the OGC Portal.
OGC Members can join the GeoParquet Standards Working Group via the OGC Portal. Non-OGC members are welcomed to contribute via OGC’s GeoParquet GitHub repository or by joining the OGC GeoParquet SWG Mailing List. Non-OGC members who would like to know more about full participation in the SWG are encouraged to contact the OGC Standards Program.
