OGC Newsletter - January 2005
OGC News:
January 2005
CONTENTS
Chairman's Message
Website of the Month
DEPARTMENTS:
IP Update, New Members, OGC In The News, Events, Contact, Subscribe/Unsubscribe
Back issues of OGC News are available.
CHAIRMAN'S MESSAGE
The Expanding OGC Community
The Information Technology (IT) boom of the 90's came and went. Yet, IT remains a dynamic industry. We have seen steady growth in Internet use, Web services, easily integrated components, and smaller, cheaper and more powerful devices. The IT industry's dynamism and growth reflects technology developers' continuing success in selling innovative IT solutions to governments, businesses and consumers.
The growing body of OGC interface specifications now provides a rich and robust set of standards for deploying geospatially enabled web services and for integrating geospatial functionality into enterprise systems. Old limitations to content and technology integration are disappearing as geospatial technology providers begin to include OGC standards into their products.
Is the scope of enterprise computing and IT services for consumers expanding to include geospatial capabilities or is the scope of geospatial technology expanding as it embraces changes in IT? Both. The combining of technical capabilities from both sides underlies the unfolding of future applications that will employ geospatial information and technology. We in OGC believe that the "manifest destiny" of IT and of geospatial technology is their seamless union.
The growth of OGC is best seen not in terms of technologies but in terms of addressing the requirements of an expanding set of user communities. A major aspect of OGC's mission is to help the larger IT community understand that geospatial technology is becoming an inseparable part of mainstream IT. As our work becomes known, the OGC community is brought into contact with developers, researchers, and users who had hitherto not seen the latent and valuable - geospatial connection to their work. We usually find that the OGC standards created to date can solve many of their existing geospatial interoperability issues. At the same time, their needs also reveal new interoperability and interface requirements. We make connections with these communities through our members and their customers and providers, through our involvement in other standards organizations, through conferences, publications and web sites, and through OGC staff directly contacting community leaders. Community building and market outreach is something we take very seriously.
Of course, not only people from outside our industry but also people experienced with geospatial technologies continue to come to OGC with important interoperability and integration problems that can only be solved with standards. Experts in emergency response, insurance, transportation, homeland security and many other domains may have used geospatial technologies for years, but now they see ways to expand their spatial capabilities. Some of the new standards implementations help them address their long-standing needs, such as data model integration, and some of the implementations address new needs and opportunities that arise as a result of IT developments in areas such as web services and wireless communications. Removal of the boundaries that once confined geospatial data and technologies offers the opportunity to break out of stovepipes, draw on new resources, and enhance workflows and enterprise operations with information that could not have been easily integrated before.
We anticipate that as our members and other stakeholders continue to think creatively about what might be accomplished in the OGC consensus process, the scope of our technologies and of our community of technologists and practitioners will continue to grow. The value of our offering increases as our body of spatial standards matures and proliferates and as diverse communities of spatial technology stakeholders come together in OGC to address problems that need industry consensus.
David Schell
Chairman
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
WEBSITE OF THE MONTH
Portion of map from portal.
DM Solutions whipped up a website in response to the Tsunami Disaster in the Indian Ocean in just six days.
"Most of the datasources come through OGC services, and frankly it would have been impossible for this to come together so quickly without data availability through OGC Standards" wrote Dave McIlhagga President, DM Solutions Group. The website was developed with the open source MapServer and Chameleon technologies.
Among the datasets, the Landsat data for Thailand accessible in the "Satellite Images" map is coming directly from the Asian Institute of Technology as a WMS Service. Other data is from Canadian government resources, the European Space Agency, and private companies. More data resources are welcomed: "We encourage Data Providers to help us respond to Data User requirements by providing no-cost, high quality (geo-referenced) data that can be quickly and effectively integrated within this Website and used to generate meaningful and helpful maps."
Know of a website that uses OpenGIS specifications to solve a real world problem or demonstrates an interesting use? Drop the 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
The Web Processing Service (WPS) Interoperability Experiment (IE)
The Web Processing Service (WPS) Interoperability Experiment (IE) has been approved by the OGC Review Board and is preparing for a Kickoff meeting. The purpose of the WPS IE is to validate the ability of the WPS draft specification to support the requirements of geospatially related calculations and modeling over the Internet, and to recommend changes to the specification if it does not support these requirements.
The IE will address the following aspects of Web Processing:
- simple geospatial algorithms
- simple data table content manipulation
- data table structure manipulation
- chaining of services
The WPS IE was proposed by three members as initiators: NR Canada, PCI Geomatics, and Galdos. Other members have since expressed interest in participating or observing and a press release is planned to tap participants. If you are interested in the WPS IE, contact the Initiative Manager, Morishitaj [at] AGR.GC.CA (Joan Morishita) or Initiative Technical Lead, schutp [at] agr.gc.ca (Peter Schut).
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.
Belgian Biodiversity Information Facility (Belgium)
University
U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF)
Associate
OGC IN THE NEWS
December 6, 2004
OGC Requests Information on Contextual State Description Services
November 10, 2004
EVENTS
January 17-20, 2005
New York, NY
OGC Technical and Planning Committee Meetings
January 25, 2005
London, UK
DGI 2005
February 13-16, 2005
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
GeoTec Event Providing Perspective, Gaining Insight
March 6-9, 2005
Denver, Colorado, USA
GITA's Annual Conference 28 - Crossing Boundries:
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 9-10, 2005
Stockholm, Sweden
ISO/TC 211 20th Plenary
July 4-15 2005
Fiesole (Florence) Italy
3rd annual Vespucci International Summer School on GI Science
CONTACT
Please send comments and suggestions to:
SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE
To subscribe send mail to: newsletter-request [at] opengeospatial.org
with "subscribe" (no quotes) in the subject.
To unsubscribe send mail to: newsletter-request [at] opengeospatial.org
with "unsubscribe" (no quotes) in the subject.
Visit our subscription page
CONTENTS
Chairman's MessageWebsite of the MonthDEPARTMENTS:
IP Update, New Members, OGC In The News, Events, Contact, Subscribe/Unsubscribe
Back issues of OGC News are available.
 |
CHAIRMAN'S MESSAGE
The Expanding OGC Community
The Information Technology (IT) boom of the 90's came and went. Yet, IT remains a dynamic industry. We have seen steady growth in Internet use, Web services, easily integrated components, and smaller, cheaper and more powerful devices. The IT industry's dynamism and growth reflects technology developers' continuing success in selling innovative IT solutions to governments, businesses and consumers.
The growing body of OGC interface specifications now provides a rich and robust set of standards for deploying geospatially enabled web services and for integrating geospatial functionality into enterprise systems. Old limitations to content and technology integration are disappearing as geospatial technology providers begin to include OGC standards into their products.
Is the scope of enterprise computing and IT services for consumers expanding to include geospatial capabilities or is the scope of geospatial technology expanding as it embraces changes in IT? Both. The combining of technical capabilities from both sides underlies the unfolding of future applications that will employ geospatial information and technology. We in OGC believe that the "manifest destiny" of IT and of geospatial technology is their seamless union.
The growth of OGC is best seen not in terms of technologies but in terms of addressing the requirements of an expanding set of user communities. A major aspect of OGC's mission is to help the larger IT community understand that geospatial technology is becoming an inseparable part of mainstream IT. As our work becomes known, the OGC community is brought into contact with developers, researchers, and users who had hitherto not seen the latent and valuable - geospatial connection to their work. We usually find that the OGC standards created to date can solve many of their existing geospatial interoperability issues. At the same time, their needs also reveal new interoperability and interface requirements. We make connections with these communities through our members and their customers and providers, through our involvement in other standards organizations, through conferences, publications and web sites, and through OGC staff directly contacting community leaders. Community building and market outreach is something we take very seriously.
Of course, not only people from outside our industry but also people experienced with geospatial technologies continue to come to OGC with important interoperability and integration problems that can only be solved with standards. Experts in emergency response, insurance, transportation, homeland security and many other domains may have used geospatial technologies for years, but now they see ways to expand their spatial capabilities. Some of the new standards implementations help them address their long-standing needs, such as data model integration, and some of the implementations address new needs and opportunities that arise as a result of IT developments in areas such as web services and wireless communications. Removal of the boundaries that once confined geospatial data and technologies offers the opportunity to break out of stovepipes, draw on new resources, and enhance workflows and enterprise operations with information that could not have been easily integrated before.
We anticipate that as our members and other stakeholders continue to think creatively about what might be accomplished in the OGC consensus process, the scope of our technologies and of our community of technologists and practitioners will continue to grow. The value of our offering increases as our body of spatial standards matures and proliferates and as diverse communities of spatial technology stakeholders come together in OGC to address problems that need industry consensus.
David Schell
Chairman
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
|
WEBSITE OF THE MONTH
DM Solutions whipped up a website in response to the Tsunami Disaster in the Indian Ocean in just six days.
"Most of the datasources come through OGC services, and frankly it would have been impossible for this to come together so quickly without data availability through OGC Standards" wrote Dave McIlhagga President, DM Solutions Group. The website was developed with the open source MapServer and Chameleon technologies.
Among the datasets, the Landsat data for Thailand accessible in the "Satellite Images" map is coming directly from the Asian Institute of Technology as a WMS Service. Other data is from Canadian government resources, the European Space Agency, and private companies. More data resources are welcomed: "We encourage Data Providers to help us respond to Data User requirements by providing no-cost, high quality (geo-referenced) data that can be quickly and effectively integrated within this Website and used to generate meaningful and helpful maps."
Know of a website that uses OpenGIS specifications to solve a real world problem or demonstrates an interesting use? Drop the 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
The Web Processing Service (WPS) Interoperability Experiment (IE)
The Web Processing Service (WPS) Interoperability Experiment (IE) has been approved by the OGC Review Board and is preparing for a Kickoff meeting. The purpose of the WPS IE is to validate the ability of the WPS draft specification to support the requirements of geospatially related calculations and modeling over the Internet, and to recommend changes to the specification if it does not support these requirements.
The IE will address the following aspects of Web Processing:
- simple geospatial algorithms
- simple data table content manipulation
- data table structure manipulation
- chaining of services
The WPS IE was proposed by three members as initiators: NR Canada, PCI Geomatics, and Galdos. Other members have since expressed interest in participating or observing and a press release is planned to tap participants. If you are interested in the WPS IE, contact the Initiative Manager, Morishitaj [at] AGR.GC.CA (Joan Morishita) or Initiative Technical Lead, schutp [at] agr.gc.ca (Peter Schut).
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.
Belgian Biodiversity Information Facility (Belgium)
University
U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF)
Associate
|
OGC IN THE NEWS
- OGC in the Press
Hitachi Software Completes Implementation of Any*GIS at City of Fontana
January 5, 2005
IONIC to Build the Luxembourg National Cadastral Department Interoperable GeoPortal
January 4, 2005
Mapping and Markup, Part 2 (Part 1)
John E. Simpson
December 29, 2004
XML.com
Intergraph Successful in GML Relay
December 2, 2004
(Further details here )
An Executive Interview with Carsten Heiermann, CEO, LuraTech on JPEG 2000
Joe Francica
Dec 17, 2004
- OGC Press Releases
OGC Announces New Trademark Licensing Fee StructureDecember 6, 2004
OGC Requests Information on Contextual State Description Services
November 10, 2004
|
EVENTS
January 17-20, 2005
New York, NY
OGC Technical and Planning Committee Meetings
January 25, 2005
London, UK
DGI 2005
February 13-16, 2005
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
GeoTec Event Providing Perspective, Gaining Insight
March 6-9, 2005
Denver, Colorado, USA
GITA's Annual Conference 28 - Crossing Boundries:
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 9-10, 2005
Stockholm, Sweden
ISO/TC 211 20th Plenary
July 4-15 2005
Fiesole (Florence) Italy
3rd annual Vespucci International Summer School on GI Science
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
|
SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE
To subscribe send mail to: newsletter-request [at] opengeospatial.org
with "subscribe" (no quotes) in the subject.
To unsubscribe send mail to: newsletter-request [at] opengeospatial.org
with "unsubscribe" (no quotes) in the subject.
Visit our subscription page
|
Copyright 2005 by the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.
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