29 November 2012. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)invites participation in a Groundwater Interoperability Experiment (GWIE2).

This activity, which began on 23 October 2012, will developand test the candidate OGC Groundwater Markup Language (GWML) 2 standard byharmonizing and advancing existing initiatives such as GWML1, the EU-INSPIREeffort, GeoSciML, and others. Participants will then prepare an engineeringreport with the intent to develop it into a data encoding specification thatwill be advanced toward adoption as the OGC Groundwater Markup Language 2 (GWML2) Standard. This activity is being carried out within the Hydrology DomainWorking Group, which operates under the auspices of the OGC and the WorldMeteorological Organization.

GWML 2 will meet the requirements for a human-readable andmachine-readable transfer standard for groundwater feature data, including dataabout water wells, aquifers, and related entities. GWML 2 will also serve as areference for hydrological observations related to these features. (See the OGC WaterML2.0 EncodingStandard.)

The OGC members that are acting as initiators of theInteroperability Experiment are:

  • CommonwealthScientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)
  • EuropeanCommission (JRC)
  • NaturalResources Canada (NRCan)
  • USGeological Survey (USGS)

A summary of the activity plan, requirements forparticipation, schedule, and kick-off meeting details are available at: http://external.opengeospatial.org/twiki_public/HydrologyDWG/GroundwaterInteroperabilityExperiment2.

Expressions of interest for participationare due by 27 December 2012.

Contact Boyan.Brodaric@nrcan.gc.cafor further details or to register as a participant.

OGC testbeds, pilot projects and interoperabilityexperiments are part of the OGC's Interoperability Program, a global, hands-oncollaborative prototyping program designed to rapidly develop, test and deliverproven candidate specifications into the OGC's Standards Program, where theyare formalized for public release. These initiatives enable users and providersof geospatial technology to share the costs of developing standards thatprovide a foundation for “future-proof” enterprise architectures.Providers reduce their costs of developing and maintaining interfaces andencodings while gaining industry recognition, the confidence of an initiative'ssponsoring organizations, and the market growth that results from openstandards.

An OGC Interoperability Experiment is a rapid, low overhead,formally structured OGC-facilitated activity in which members achieve specifictechnical objectives that further the OGC Technical Baseline.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 470companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universitiesparticipating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatialstandards. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatialinformation and services accessible and useful with any application that needsto be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website athttp://www.opengeospatial.org/contact/.

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