Wayland, MA, June 15, 2006 — Interoperable OGC Web Services (OWS) applied to the Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS) architecture were successfully demonstrated at a 22-23 May 2006 workshop at the 2006 International Symposium on Future Intelligent Earth Observing Satellites (FIEOS'06) in Beijing, China. This was the third in a series of GEOSS Architecture workshops organized by IEEE.

The workshop, titled “The User and GEOSS Architecture III”, focused on wind energy and natural resource management. Dr. Jinsoo You and Dr. Konstantin Nurutdinov, both of the Centre for Geospatial Science, University of Nottingham, UK, organized the demonstration, which showed the role of the OGC's standards in the open architecture that underpins the “system of systems.” Eighteen organizations from six countries participated in the demonstration.

The demonstration showed complex 4D wind data and online meteorological processing services being published, discovered, and accessed on the Web using existing OGC standards as highlighted in the GEOSS 10 Year Implementation Plan.

Charlotte Hasager of the Wind Energy Department at Denmark's Risoe National Laboratory said, “Use of distributed web services is clearly a very good option to be further exploited in wind energy. In China the aim to use satellite imagery and database information for wind resource mapping is higher than anywhere else I have seen. So it was a very good place to have this demonstration indeed.”

Chao Wang, China Remote Sensing Satellite Ground Station (RSGS); Dr. Jay Pearlman, Chair of the IEEE Committee on Earth Observations (CEO); and Prof. Leung Tsang, executive vice president of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) moderated. Prof. Mike Jackson, director of the Centre for Geospatial Science, said, “The demonstration was a great example of what can be achieved when laboratories around the world collaborate together through the adoption of the OGC interoperability standards.”

The OGC® is an international industry consortium of more than 310 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface specifications. OpenGIS® Specifications support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and
location-based services, and mainstream IT. The specifications empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful with all kinds of applications. Visit the OGC website at® http://www.opengeospatial.org.