November 01, 2010 – The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate OGC Sensor Observation Service (SOS) Standard Version 2.0. The SOS candidate interface standard is designed to provide access to sensor observations, sensor descriptions, and digital representations of observed features in an interoperable and standardized way. Further, the SOS 2.0 candidate standard provides means to insert new sensor descriptions or observations.

The OGC Sensor Observation Service revision incorporates several enhancements. These include a modular restructuring of the document, new KVP and SOAP bindings, redesign of the observation offering concept, and reliance on the OGC Sensor Web Enablement Service Model. SOS 2.0 is highly modular and follows the OGC core/extension design pattern. The main SOS 2.0 document incorporates the core as well as the transactional extension, result handling extension, enhanced operations extension, binding extension, and a profile for spatial filtering of observations. An additional document specifies the extension for the operation to retrieve metadata about the observations stored by a service.

The proposed OGC SOS 2.0 standard and information on submitting comments on this document are available at: http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/73. The public comment period closes on 1st of December 2010.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 400 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC 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/contact.