OGC Newsletter - November 2004

November 2004

CONTENTS
President
News from Europe
Website of the Month

DEPARTMENTS:
IP Update, New Members, OGC In The News, Events, Contact, Subscribe/Unsubscribe

Back issues of OGC News are available.


PRESIDENT

Global Market Acceptance of OGC Standards

OGC now has 266 members from 31 countries. On our website, a wide range of companies, agencies, universities, NGO's, and open source developers have registered 236 software products compliant with, or implementing, OGC standards. We continue to identify new implementations within the user community. It's interesting to see from an occasional Web search that these statistics understate both the number of organizations implementing OGC-based solutions and the number of vendors providing software that complies with or implements the specifications. It's hard to develop statistics, but qualitatively, the progress we see is always exciting. It seems obvious that the constant upward trend is simply attributable to increased awareness of the benefits of interoperability.

For example, GeoArctic International Services, Inc., Refractions Research, Inc., Innovative Mapping Solutions, LLC and Moxi Media are not OGC members and I didn't know anything about them until I found them on the Web in a brief search to find companies that use OGC specifications. There are many others like them.

Let me share with you three exciting applications from one information community. First, GoMOOS, the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System, brings hourly oceanographic data from the Gulf of Maine to anyone who needs it, and the organization is committed to OGC-based interoperability. OpenIOOS.org, "...where standards enable innovation," a project of the National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP), is preparing an interoperability demo. OpenIOOS is a collaboration of fifteen federal agencies to provide leadership and coordination of national oceanographic research and education programs. Finally, the WorldFish Center, Malaysia has deployed ReefBase, A Global Information System on Coral Reefs using the WMS interface standard. The oceanographic community "gets it."

CustomWeather is a company that provides US nationwide value-added weather data. It's using WMS to distribute its information products. And, while the company is not an OGC member, it has recognized the value of implementing OGC standards to expand the usefulness of its products across the marketplace. This is one of several solutions in the weather sector that implements OGC standards. Indeed, oceanography and weather represent two of the many "information communities" working to seize the value of interoperability.

Most people in our industry have heard about the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI), the Canadian National Forest Information Service (NFIS), the US National Map and Geospatial One-Stop, US Census Bureau WebTIGER project, and other national programs that implement OGC specifications. But according to Internet World Stats, a website providing up-to-date worldwide Internet usage statistics, the world region with the slowest Internet growth recently has been North America, which grew only 106% in the last four years, while the number of Internet users globally has grown 125%. This fact leads one to surmise that uptake of OGC specifications may be happening faster overseas than it is happening here. Readers of this newsletter probably have read about the United Nation's commitment, the UN's FAO GeoNetwork, the advanced use of OGC specifications in Australian SDI development, the work of the Directorate General Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Europe, the King George Island research portal in Antarctica, and other implementations. But a casual Web search reveals other overseas activity: Digital Asia Network, GBIF-Austria Web portal, University of Sienna RERGO project in Italy, and many others. We know there is also activity beginning in China and India.

For the last decade we've been promoting open geoprocessing around the world, and we are seeing the results. One more example: The Geospatial Interoperability Demonstration at GEOINT 2004 in New Orleans this month, which featured OGC standards, was a huge success, and as a consequence we've been asked to organize a demonstration in London at the Defence Geospatial Intelligence (DGI) 2005 conference 25th-27th, January 2005. One thing leads to another in the march toward global interoperability. Global interoperability is what our members want, and all of the activity mentioned above suggests that their investment is yielding the desired results.

Mark Reichardt
President, OGC

NEWS FROM EUROPE

ORCHESTRA

A Sixth Framework Integrated Project to improve risk management in the European Union, Open Architecture and Spatial Data Infrastructure for Risk Management (ORCHESTRA) has kicked off. ORCHESTRA aims to bring together and consolidate the risk management community by integrating the results and recommendations of the previous and existing work into the technical underpinnings for risk management.

The 36-month project will design a service oriented architecture for risk management, including the software infrastructure for enabling the development and validation of risk management services. Existing International Standards Organization (ISO), European standards from the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) and implementation specification standards from OGC and work from other standards bodies are to be the basis for the architecture. Results of the project will also include new software specifications for consideration by OGC and other standards bodies.

INSPIRE

Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE) is a legal framework proposed for establishing a spatial data infrastructure (SDI). Preparatory action will commence in 2005 and aims to set the foundation for wider exploitation of spatial information in European governments. INSPIRE's goals include:

A base collection of technical rules, policies & institutional arrangements

- To facilitate discovery, evaluation, application
of (existing digital) geospatial and environmental data

- For users and providers within all levels of government, the commercial sector, the non-profit sector, academia and by citizens in general

INSPIRE is currently on the European Parliament's agenda for consideration as a Directive. Consultation processes for interested and effected communities will take place as part of the legislative process.

Louis G. Hecht, Jr.
Chair, Open Geospatial Consortium (Europe), Limited (OGCE)

WEBSITE OF THE MONTH




Nova Scotia offers 41 layers in its Thematic Atlas Web Map Service including agriculture, fire towers and private surface water. According to the website, The Nova Scotia Thematic Atlas WMS is an Internet based service that provides developers an opportunity to access thematic-centric mapping products. The Nova Scotia Thematic Atlas is the province's gateway for publishing thematic mapping products. By using the service, developers will have steady access to creative and dynamic thematic map products from many Nova Scotia agencies. There's also a Topographic Database WMS with 19 layers including contours, roads, land cover and drainage.
 
Know of a website that uses OpenGIS specifications to solve a real world problem or demonstrates an interesting use? Drop the adena [at] opengeospatial.org (editor) an e-mail with the details including the URL, organization behind the website, specifications used, technology used and the goal of the website.



IP UPDATE

Interoperability Experiments (IEs) are a new kind of OGC Interoperability Initiative. They are brief, inexpensive, low-overhead initiatives led and executed by OGC members to achieve specific technical objectives. IEs are focused on advancing a specific topic defined by an existing OGC Implementation Specification or Discussion paper. One such experiment is complete, with others in the wings.

The LandGML Interoperability Experiment initiated by Autodesk, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Engineering Research and Development Center, and Galdos Systems is now complete. The results were presented at the Chicago meetings and at the Geospatial Symposium 2004 in August. A new Technical Committee Working Group has been created to continue the work on LandGML and to address the topic of CAD/3D/GML.

Three other potential topics were identified for IEs were identified at the September meeting. These include Web Services Context Document Schema Interoperability Experiment, Sensor Alert Services Interoperability Experiment, a Geoprocessing Services Interoperability Experiment, and a GML-in-JPEG2000 Interoperability Experiment. Activity Plans are under development for these efforts. OGC members are welcome to join these activities.

For more information on the Interoperability Program, please contact percivall [at] opengeospatial.org (George Percivall).

NEW MEMBERS

OGC welcomes new members who joined us recently.

NETCAD Ulusal CAD&GIS Cozumleri A.S. (Turkey)
Associate

Optex Inc. (Canada)
Small Company

OGC IN THE NEWS

- OGC in the Press

Common Pitfalls When Analyzing WMS/WFS Capabilities
Nuke Goldstein
Directions Magazine
October 29, 2004

Data Integration and Interoperability: ISO/OGC Standards for Geo-information
Carl Reed III
Directions Magazine
October 27, 2004

GeoDecisions Becomes a Member of OGC
October 14, 2004

- OGC Press Releases

OGC Demonstrates Decision Support Service Chaining
November 3, 2004

ISO/TC211 Approves OGC Web Map Service as International Standard
November 1, 2004

OGC Announces Call for Input on Geospatial Digital Rights Management
October 21, 2004

OGC Announces RFQ to Develop Reference Implementation in Kentucky
October 18, 2004

OGC Interoperability Demo Planned for Interoperability 2004
October 14, 2004

EVENTS

January 17-20, 2005
New York, NY
OGC Technical and Planning Committee Meetings

January 25, 2005
London, UK
DGI 2005

April 4-7, 2005
Frascati, Italy
OGC Technical and Planning Committee Meetings

April 16, 2005
Cairo, Egypt
8th International Conference for Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI-8)

June 9, 2005
Stockholm, Sweden
ISO/TC 211 20th Plenary

For further info on events please contact gbuehler [at] opengeospatial.org (Greg Buehler).

CONTACT

Please send comments and suggestions to:

adena [at] opengeospatial.org (Adena Schutzberg)
Editor, OGC News

Open Geospatial Consortium
35 Main Street Suite 5
Wayland MA 01778-5037
USA Phone: +1 508 655 5858
Fax: +1 508 655 2237

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Copyright 2004 by the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.