OGC Newsletter - July/August 2007
CONTENTS
President's Message: 2007 Kenneth D. Gardels AwardCTO's Report on the July 2007 TC and PC Meetings in ParisNews and Opinion From The BlogosphereWebsite of the MonthNews ItemAnnouncementDEPARTMENTS:
New Members, OGC In The News, Events, Contact, Subscribe/Unsubscribe
Back issues of OGC News are available.
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PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE: 2007 KENNETH D. GARDELS AWARD
At the July OGC meetings in Paris, Clemens Portele of interactive instruments GmbH was awarded the OGC's ninth Kenneth D. Gardels Award.
Clemens has been deeply involved in a range of important OGC programs. The success of OGC's cooperative endeavor with ISO owes much to Clemens' diplomacy, patience and persistence. His leadership role in the INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial InfoRmation in Europe) Data Specifications Drafting Team contributes to a process that influences the progress of European policy with respect to OGC standards. He has also provided important support to a range of OGC documents including the GML application schema for use by OASIS, a GML version of the Aeronautical Information Exchange Model (AIXM), and the GML Simple Features Profile, to name a few. I ask that you visit the OGC website to read his award citation and the citations of previous award winners at http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/awards
The occasion of Clemens' award merits some words about Kenn Gardels and the mission of our Consortium.
The Gardels Award was conceived to memorialize the spirit of Kenneth Gardels, a founding member and director of the OGC. Kenn was a man who dreamt of making the world a better place through open communication and the use of information technology to improve the quality of human life. The OGC Board selects the annual award recipient from nominations provided by a committee comprised of previous Gardels awardees.
Kenn coined the phrase "Open GIS". He was active in popularizing the open source GIS "GRASS" and was a key figure in the early Internet community of people who used and developed that software. Kenn was well known in the field of GIS and was involved over the years in many programs related to GIS and the environment. He is remembered for his principles, courage, and humility, and for his accomplishments in promoting spatial technologies as tools for preserving the environment and serving human needs.
Kenn embraced the concept of "Think globally, act locally." This phrase originated with scientist René Dubos at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. The phrase grows ever more meaningful with humanity's growing concerns about climate change, population growth, pollution, energy constraints and the "flattening" of the world community. "Think globally, act locally" is particularly meaningful for the geospatial community, because our technologies help people rationalize seemingly broad and at times intangible issues into a local context, and because the environmental themes Gardels and Dubos cared about are so obviously tied to geospatial features and phenomena.
I am, as Kenn would be, grateful to each of the people who have received the Gardels award. I am grateful for their extraordinary efforts and their leadership in our unique community, and for helping to advance the interoperability mission of the Consortium. Clemens has earned the appreciation of the others who participate in the OGC, but he would be the first to point out that this is a collaborative effort in which we are all helping each other achieve common goals. For me, it is truly an honor to be part of this community.
-Mark Reichardt
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CTO'S REPORT ON THE JULY 2007 TC AND PC MEETINGS IN PARIS
The 61st OGC Technical Committee meetings were held the week of July 9th in Paris, France. The meetings were sponsored by Platinum Sponsor Ionic Software and Silver Sponsor BRGM. Over 180 individuals attended and participated in the various Working Group meetings.
During the meetings, the following document actions were approved:
As an OGC Best Practice:
- CityGML Engineering Specification (07-062)
- GML 3.1.1 Application schema for Earth Observation product (06-080)
- Ordering Services for Earth Observation Products (06-141)
- OpenGIS® Sensor Planning Service Application Profile for EO Sensors (07-018r1)
As an OGC Discussion Paper:
- OGC 07-056r1 - Annex to OGC Policy and Procedures - The Specification Model
- OGC Web Services Architectural Profile for the NSG (OGC Document 07-009r2)
- WMS Application Profile for EO Products (06-093)
As a revision to the OGC Abstract Specification:
- ISO 19123:2005, Coverage geometry and functions as an OGC Abstract Specification Topic 6.
The members approved the formation of three new Revision Working Groups for
the following candidate standards:
- GeoXACML
- Image Geopositioning Service
- WFS Gazetteer Application Profile
The members also approved releases of corrigendums (minor corrections) to both the Catalogue and Web Coverage Service standards.
And finally, the members approved standards adoption votes for:
- OGC Location Services version 1.2 Core Services
- OGC Loation Service Tracking Service Specification as an extension to Core Services
The next Technical Committee meetings will be held in Boulder, Colorado during the week of September 17, 2007.
-Carl Reed
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NEWS AND OPINION FROM THE BLOGOSPHERE
Below are some of the discussions of OGC specifications in the blogosphere since the last edition of this newsletter:
8 June: In "It's About Place (Part 2)" -- contributed to Sramana Mitra's blog by Cal McElroy -- he discusses some of the history of location technology, and toward the end of the article he notes, "While OGC set out to liberate geographic data from proprietary GIS and mapping systems, ultimately they sparked a revolution that will enable location intelligence in any application or web service."
On April 18, blogger Steve Lombardi at Virtual Earth spelled out the promise of GeoRSS: "a standard way to exchange map information with the potential to impact geo technologies the way rss/atom have changed the way we deal with news and other information."
17 April: Jelle Hielkema at the UNSDI HUCO blog shared the announcement reported by Jeroen Ticheler of FAO NRCE, that they have implemented the Open Geospatial Consortium Catalog Services for the Web (OGC-CSW) specification. "As a result of the project, GeoNetwork opensource is the so-called Reference Implementation of the CSW specification for the OGC."
4 April Sebastian Good, who blogs at "It is what it is" asks what REST means for GIS, and goes on to comment that "... The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) guys have had a good amount of luck getting some useful standards into widespread use."
30 March. Chad in "The Earth Is Square" highlighted the release by NGA of "Geospatial Intelligence Standards: Enabling a Common Vision". He pointed out that it endorses the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) 1.0 baseline. The post generated 8 comments.
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WEBSITE OF THE MONTH
The OOSTethys website describes developments in ocean-observing systems, with a focus on progress toward a system-of-ocean-observing-systems. OOSTethys provides a community-developed set of software tools that implement OGC specifications. It also offers guidance documents ("cookbooks") to help data providers get started using standards-based data-exchange capabilities.
- Sensor network feeds observations to DATA PROVIDER (an OOS system such as GoMOOS)
- Data Provider installs SOS software and registers URL with OOSTethys REGISTRY (or catalog) (for this project, the catalog is at UAH)
- Data Provider sensor observations become discoverable to the OOSTethys DATA AGGREGATOR (OpenIOOS)
- OOSTethys CLIENT runs GetProviders and GetCapabilities processes every hour to generate current map of active data providers and the observations that are available.
- Map is generated and displayed on DATA ANALYZER and VIEWER (OpenIOOS.org)
- End user clicks point on map at http://www.openioos.org, GetObservation process is kicked off and current observation is returned to user.
Also noteworthy are details of OCEANS IE and information on how to participate. OOSTethys participants initiated an OGC Interoperability Experiment in December 2006 to engage data managers and scientists in the Ocean-Observing community to advance their understanding and application of various OGC specifications, solidify demonstrations for Ocean Science application areas, harden software implementations, and produce candidate OGC Best Practices documents that can be used to inform the broader ocean-observing community.
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NEWS ITEM
In April, Microsoft launched a new version of Live Maps with GeoRSS publishing. Points, lines and polygons are supported. The functionality is illustrated at "My Bike Trails," which features rides around Seattle.
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ANNOUNCEMENT
The National Weather Service provides experimental web feature service (WFS) access to the National Digital Forecast Database. Comments and feedback are requested and will be accepted through 31 October 2007. For more information, see the announcement made by NOAA's Office of Climate, Water and Weather Services. See also the National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD) Experimental Web Feature Service (WFS) web page.
Feedback can be submitted via the online survey. Feedback or questions can be e-mailed to nws.xml [at] noaa.gov. The NWS contacts for this service are John.Schattel [at] noaa.gov (John Schattel) and Robert.Bunge [at] noaa.gov (Bob Bunge). The Service Description Document (SDD) for this new service is approved and signed, but not yet posted to the NWS Catalog of Experimental Products. When it is posted, the URL for the SDD will be http://products.weather.gov/PDD/PDD_GMLgen.pdf.
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NEW MEMBERS
OGC welcomes new members who joined us recently.
Forward Slope, Inc. (Small Company) (United States)Mapufacture Inc. (Small Company) (United States)
The Aerospace Corporation (Research Institute / Not For Profit Institute) (United States)
FortiusOne, Inc. (Small Company) (United States)
OSS Nokalva, Inc. (Associate) (United States)
European Environment Agency (EEA) (Technical) (Denmark)
Yahoo! (Technical) (United States)
Safa Rayaneh MSC SDN BHD (Small Company) (Malaysia)
AIS (Agenium Informatique et Systemes) (Small Company) (France)
Lisasoft Pty Ltd (Small Company) (Australia)
Emergeo Solutions, Inc. (Small Company) (Canada)
IT Innovation (University) (United Kingdom)
Wellfleet Software Corporation (Research Institute / Not For Profit Institute) (United States)
Texas State University (University) (United States)
DigitalGlobe, Inc. (Associate) (United States)
Vega Group PLC (Technical) (United Kingdom)
Sunertek inc. (Small Company) (Canada)
Remote Sensing Technology Center of Japan (RESTEC) (Associate) (Japan)
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OGC IN THE NEWS
- OGC in the Press
In the July issue of GIM International, Dale Lutz's essay "Uniting an Industry" identifies several ways in which his company, Safe Software, benefits from the interoperability enabled by OGC standards. His closing paragraph conveys his belief that the benefits extend far beyond his company: "The geospatial community owes much to the OGC for championing the vision of data interoperability and providing a framework for the realisation of this vision."
The July issue of Geospatial Today includes an article by Carey Mann, "Integrated GIS is the future," in which he notes a trend toward "...greater leverage of interoperability technologies (such as OGC standards like WMS and WFS)."
The same issue also includes a brief article, "GML - the key enabler," in which Sam Bacharach provides a look at the history and status of the OpenGIS® Geography Markup LanguageTM (GMLTM).
In July, GIM International contributing editor Christiaan Lemmen introduced the fourth product survey on "Spatial Data Management in Geo-databases" by reflecting on progress since the first survey in 2002. At that time, he observed that spatial-data management was traditionally supported within GIS environments; integrating spatial data with other datasets had to be explicitly organized with the aid of complementary architectures. In comparison, "Five years on, a set of mature geo-databases is available on the market, .... Thanks to OGC, developments have been rapid."
A June article in Geospatial Solutions, GeoSite Simplifies Site Management, noted that "GeoSite relies on Open GIS Consortium (OGC) specifications, such as the Web Map Service (WMS), to dynamically query GIS data and return the result in a format that may be displayed in Google Earth."
GeoTEC Event 2007 in May featured a full-day workshop on OGC Web Services, and a number of presentations about work involving OGC standards. For example, the following abstracts can be viewed online:
- Using 3-D Open Web Services for a Better Collaborative Response to Disaster Management (page 3)
- National Forest Information System: We're More than Just Maps (page 3)
- The Alberta Web Mapping Services Prototype Project (page 1)
- Extending the Web Map Service to Handheld Devices (page 1)
- Management and Web Distribution of Very Large Volume (100TB) of Digital Image Data (page 3)
The March 2007 issue of "BuildingSMART News" noted (page 2) the organization's collaboration with OGC, including input to OWS-4. The group is particularly interested in CityGML and the interfaces to it.
- OGC Press Releases
The OGC Announces Styled Layer Descriptor & Symbol Encoding Specifications
August 15, 2007
The OGC Announces Transducer Markup Language (TML) Specification
August 9, 2007
Clemens Portele Receives OGC's Gardels Award
August 8, 2007
Charles Roswell Receives OGC Lifetime Achievement Award
August 7, 2007
OGC's David Schell Receives GeoTec Media Visionary Achievement Award
July 19, 2007
The OGC Announces New Automated Compliance Tests
June 26, 2007
Building Information Models (BIM) Demonstrated in OGC Testbed
June 26, 2007
The OGC Seeks Comment on Proposed Access Control and Image Positioning Specifications
May 15, 2007
The OGC® Announces Call for Participation in OWS-5 Testbed
May 11, 2007
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EVENTS
September 17-20, 2007, Boulder, Colorado,
September 2007 OGC Technical Committee Meetings
September 21, 2007, Boulder, Colorado,
September 2007 OGC Planning Committee Meeting
September 21-22, 2007, Boulder, Colorado,
GEOSS Workshop: The User and the GEOSS Architecture XVI “Local Decisions for Global Climate Change”
September 24-27, 2007, Victoria, Canada,
2007 Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) Conference
October 15-17, 2007, Huntsville, Alabama,
Rocket City Geospatial Conference 2007
October 29-30, 2007, Ottawa, Ontario
Great Lakes Regional Data Exchange 2007
For further info on events please contact gbuehler [at] opengeospatial.org (Greg Buehler).
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CONTACT
Please send comments and suggestions to:
tcary [at] opengeospatial.org (Tina Cary)
Editor, OGC News
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.
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 2007 by the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.
