OGC Newsletter - July 2009
CONTENTS
Chief Technology Officer's Message: The OGC Architecture Board (OAB)June 2009 TC and PC MeetingsNews and Opinion From The BlogosphereOGC in Social MediaWebsite of the MonthNews ItemsDEPARTMENTS:
New Members, OGC In The News, Events, Contact, Subscribe/Unsubscribe
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CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER'S MESSAGE: THE OGC ARCHITECTURE BOARD (OAB)
In many ways, the OGC standards Baseline is similar to a deployed software technology with an installed base. There are requirements for support, maintenance, bug fixes, revisions, and life cycle management. Years ago, both the OGC Planning Committee and the OGC Board of Directors had discussions related to OGC standards lifecycle management and related architecture issues. In 2005, the OGC Board of Directors recommended the formation of the OGC Architecture Board. In 2006, the OGC Technical and Planning Committees approved a standing committee of the OGC members and staff called the "OGC Architecture Board" (OAB).
In response to this TC motion, OGC Staff developed a new set of policies and procedures to govern that work of the new Architecture Board (http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=15925). In the Fall of 2007 nominations for OAB membership were offered and a formal election was held to form the new OAB. The first formal meeting of the OAB happened in November 2007.
The mission of the OAB is to provide a forum within which Consortium-wide standards architecture issues can be discussed and deliberated with the intent of providing guidance and recommendations to the TC and the PC on these issues.
The OGC Architecture Board works with the Technical Committee and the Planning Committee to ensure architecture consistency of the Baseline and provide guidance to the OGC membership to ensure strong life cycle management of the OGC standards Baseline. In order to properly provide such guidance and perform the Governance functions as outlined below, the OAB can, at its discretion, evaluate current technology issues and identify gaps in the architecture that need to be responded to by the OGC Membership.
More specifically, the OAB has responsibility to do the following:
- Review all candidate standard submissions (Requests for Comments, RFCs) and make recommendations and provide guidance as to how the candidate standard can be best aligned with the standards Baseline. In extreme cases, the OAB can ask the submission team to make significant edits and resubmit the document.
- Review revisions to existing OGC standards and make recommendations and provide guidance to ensure the document is complete and harmonized with the standards Baseline.
- Discuss and provide guidance to the membership on over-arching architecture issues, such as services.
- Review and make recommendations on new Interoperability Experiment activity plans.
- Review and vote on the adoption of any revisions to the OGC Reference Model (ORM).
In order to fulfill its mission, the OAB meets via teleconference every two weeks. Each teleconference lasts about one hour. The agenda for any teleconference varies, but ranges from discussions on candidate standards submissions, to harmonization issues, to the impacts of various information technologies on the OGC Baseline, and to architecture issues. For example, a recent OAB agenda included:
- A Service discussion on issues related to defining when to use HTTP and SOAP;
- The Web Map Tiling Service candidate standard submission;
- Discussion on SOAP vs. REST in relation to the WMTS submission.
The OAB also meets twice face-to-face at the OGC Technical Committee meetings. The meeting notes for any OAB teleconference or meeting are approved by the OAB and made available to the entire OGC Membership. Any decisions or motions related to the OGC standards Baseline are also publicly available on OGC NetworkTM.
For any discussion topic, the OAB can provide guidance and recommendations, produce a short position paper, or the OAB can make definitive statements regarding the Baseline based on the findings in these papers. Some statements may change the OGC architectural documents. Some statements address expectations for technology adoptions.
- OAB Position -- The stated position is a recommended approach for standards adoption.
- OAB Policy -- The OAB requires the subject matter to be binding on all RFC and related candidate standards submissions. Deviations will usually result in rejection.
- OAB Architecture Finding -- The OAB directs that OGC architectural documents (the Baseline and the OGC Reference Model) be updated.
Such guidance and recommendations are captured in the OAB minutes and are provided to the OGC Technical Committee as well as specific working groups or document editors. The OAB members then work with the OGC Membership to ensure proper communication and resolution of the guidance and/or recommendations.
The OAB represents a key aspect of the OGC standards life cycle management governance. The OAB is an excellent forum for the discussion of OGC architecture and related topics. Any organization, OGC Member or not, is invited to submit questions and issues to the OAB.
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JUNE 2009 TC AND PC MEETINGS
The June OGC Technical Committee meetings will be held 22-26 June in Boston, Mass., hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with sponsorship support from Mitre and MIT Lincoln Laboratory. See the agenda to plan your participation in Summits and various Working Group sessions.
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NEWS AND OPINION FROM THE BLOGOSPHERE
In All Points Blog, Adena Schutzberg's post on 5 June about "ESRI's Proposal to Update Recovery.gov" triggered reader comments to the effect that the data for mapping recovery dollars should be served using open standards, and OGC's GML and KML were specifically named as appropriate.
Gene Roe blogs about lidar. In his post of 11 May, "3D Fusion," he shares information about OGC's 3D Fusion Summit with his readers and encourages people to attend. He sees the convergence of CAD - GIS, 3 - D visualization, and BIM as "one of the most, if not the most important topic for the future growth of our industry [laser scanning]."
Jody Garnett is blogging about his preparations for tutorials he will present at the FOSS4G conference (20-23 October 2009) in Sydney. Data services at FOSS4G are being handled as part of the OGC-organized Climate Change Integration Plugfest (CCIP), which will be launched at the conference. His post of 26 April, "Stepping outside my Comfort Zone for CCIP," describes setting up a data server and shares some lessons learned. His post of 11 May, "CCIP Part 2 — Configuring GeoServer," describes his configuration experience — including bugs — and again shares lessons learned.
Jeff Harrison posted "Cross-Border mashup merges Google Maps, OGC Web Services," on 29 April. The project "developed, deployed and demonstrated the foundations of an online network to help identify critical infrastructure during emergencies and everyday operations." The project uses OGC Web Feature Service (WFS), Web Map Service (WMS) and GML standards, Google Maps, secure SDI and FGDC Emergency Mapping Symbology. The post links to a 24-slide demonstration of a pipeline-planning scenario.
Geoff Zeiss attended Map Middle East, which was in Abu Dhabi (instead of Dubai) this year. His post of 28 April, "Map Middle East 2009 Abu Dhabi: Geospatial for Design and Construction," described a symposium included in the conference and moderated by Mark Reichardt, President and CEO of the OGC. The symposium, dedicated to Geospatial for Design and Construction, included fifteen speakers and Geoff discussed the presentations of four of them.
Luc Vaillancourt noted on 26 April, in "Le Forum français de l'OGC a maintenant son propre site" that the France OGC Forum now has its own website in French, including a page about Interoperability Day 9 December 2008, with links to PowerPoint presentations and videos.
On 26 March, Jeff Harrison blogged "Rock scientists reach WMS network milestone." In the OneGeology project, more than 100 nations have now committed to serve their geology data using the OpenGIS® Web Map Services standard.
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OGC IN SOCIAL MEDIA
Bookmarking
[the following is reprinted from the November 2008 newsletter.]
An effort is underway to make OGC documents more accessible to everyone. The idea is to navigate OGC documents using Delicious. Contribute by tagging your own important OGC documents with ogcdoc, plus other keywords such as {filter georss gml owc ows sas sdi sensorml sld sos styling swe wcs wfs wmc wms wps}. More details are available at http://www.ogcnetwork.net/ogcdoc. To see documents that have already been bookmarked and tagged, go to http://delicious.com/tag/ogcdoc.
OGC has a Twitter account, see http://www.twitter.com/opengis. Those who follow opengis are alerted to OGC news releases.
On 25 May, Erlend Kvinnesland tweeted: "Note to self: Rendering a WFS containing over 3000 points WILL make firefox implode."
David Sonnen tweeted on 15 May: "OGC geospatial rights management conference: June 22, 2009 at MIT. http://is.gd/AeVa Important issue with a lot at stake."
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WEBSITE OF THE MONTH
The Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) serves several global datasets via WFS and WMS. To get a quick look at any dataset, the "get map" link brings the dataset into your browser, see Figure 1.
Figure 1. For the theme "Hotspots," this image appears in response to clicking the "get map" link at http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/mapserver/.
To work with the data, one can use the SEDAC Map Client, see Figure 2, or access the data from any other WMS / WFS compatible client. The SEDAC Map Client also supports OGC's Web Map Context (WMC) standard.
Figure 2. Raster 2005 population density data viewed in the SEDAC Map Client.
For GEOSS, CIESEN/SEDAC serves three datasets with WMS 1.1.1:
- GPW Population Data
http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/mapserver/map/GPWv3?Request=GetCapabili...
http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/mapserver/wfs/GPWv3?Request=GetCapabili...
- GRUMP (Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project) Population Data
http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/mapserver/map/GRUMPv1?Request=GetCapabi...
http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/mapserver/wfs/GRUMPv1?Request=GetCapabi...
- Species data
http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/mapserver/map/SPECIES_AMPHIBIANSv1?Requ...
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NEWS ITEMS
Motions from Athens Meetings Available
The motions from the Technical and Planning Committee Meetings in Athens, Greece, 30 March - 3 April 2009 are available on OGC Network.
W3C Charters a Semantic Sensor Network Incubator Group
OGC, Wright State University and CSIRO (Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation)-members of W3C-initiated a Semantic Sensor Network Incubator Group. The charter identifies 2 objectives: 1) development of ontologies for describing sensors, and 2) extension of the Sensor Markup Language (SML) to support semantic annotations.
AECOO-1 Webinar Is Available Online
The two-and-a-half-hour webinar about the AECOO-1 testbed is now available online. The presentations are available in video format, in four parts and the Question-and-Answer section is available as an MP3 audio:
http://www.opengeospatial.org/pub/www/aecoo-1/index.html
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NEW MEMBERS
OGC welcomes new members who joined us recently.
Agentschap voor Geografische Informatie Vlaanderen (AGIV) (Government - Subnational) (Belgium)
Carinthia University of Applied Sciences, Dept. of Geoinformation (University) (Austria)
Center for Coastal Environmental Sensing Networks (University) (United States)
Central Informatics Organization (GIS Directorate)(Associate) (Bahrain)
Intelligent Integration Systems, Inc. (IISi) (Small Company) (United States)
Japan Space Imaging Corporation (Associate) (Japan)
Korea Land Corporation (Technical) (Korea, Republic of)
Magellium (Associate) (France)
Morris, Robert A. (Individual) (United States)
National Office of Building Technology and Administration (Associate) (Norway)
Pictometry International Corporation (Associate) (United States)
Technische Universität München, Dept. of Informatics (University) (Germany)
URSIT Ltd. (Small Company) (Bulgaria)
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OGC IN THE NEWS
OGC in the News
On 18 May, GIS Weekly published "Open Geospatial Consortium Update," providing its readers an overview of coming events (the summits in Boston), the AECOO-1 testbed results, newly released discussion papers, newly formed working groups, and an introduction to the OGC Network website, including its "learn" page.
"GeoWebCache Takes the Ouch out of Tile Caching" appeared in GIS Weekly on 4 May. The lead developer talked about the motivation behind GeoWebCache and plans for the product in the future. The WMS, WFS and KML standards and the candidate WMTS standard are mentioned.
The May issue of GIS Development includes a 4-page autobiography of Dr. Robert Moses, member of OGC's Board of Directors and recently elected Chairman of OGC's Advisory Council. He recounts his path from medicine to computers and remote sensing software, and includes a section on the importance of interoperability and the creation of OGC in 1994.
The May issue of GIS Development also includes a report on Map Middle East, held in Abu Dhabi in late April. OGC President Mark Reichardt chaired the Symposium on Design and Engineering.
The May issue of Sensors and Transducers Journal includes "Sensors & Transducers Journal: Frequently Downloaded Articles." The statistics for the month of April 2009 show that the fourth-most-frequently-downloaded article was "OGC® Sensor Web Enablement Standards" by George Percivall, OGC's Executive Director, Interoperability Architecture and Carl Reed, PhD, OGC's Chief Technology Officer, with 114 downloads for the month. The article was published in September 2006 and often has been downloaded more than 100 times a month. As the sensor web continues to grow the article is likely to remain on this list.
The Spring issue of the Journal of Building Information Modeling includes "The USC School of Cinematic Arts: The Arrival of Spring in the Facilities Industry" on pages 16-17. The article mentions OGC's coordination of the AECOO-1 testbed.
Directions Magazine on 6 April published "The Evolution of Geospatial Technology Calls for Changes in Geospatial Research, Education and Government Management." OGC's Chairman David Schell and his co-authors Prof. Mike Jackson and Prof. D. R. Fraser Taylor have written a thought-provoking essay. They describe how geospatial research is done today, how academia deals with geotechnology, and how governments manage spatial data infrastructure. Then they provide a vision / recommendation of how research, education and government can be done, now that the internet and interoperable standards are ubiquitous. Three key points:
- data should be published; publication will enable more effective and efficient science;
- Interoperability Science should be developed as an academic discipline;
- governance of spatial data infrastructures should receive more attention at higher levels of government.
Government Technology published "Maine Invests in Collaborative Web Mapping" on 2 April. The Maine Office of GIS (MEGIS), in cooperation with the Maine Library of Geographic Information (GeoLibrary), has developed an open web mapping service (WMS) platform to publish several terabytes of digital aerial photos collected by municipalities. Even with very little promotion, the service started receiving 2000-3000 hits per day, and requests from municipalities to add their data.
On 1 April, GeoWorld published "True Spatial Data Interoperability: New Tools Are Turning a Dream into Reality," which identifies two key challenges to interoperability: syntax and semantics. The European Union's INSPIRE project is an example of a spatial data infrastructure project that demonstrates the importance of interoperability. In INSPIRE, OGC's GML is the specified syntax for data sharing.
On 1 April, GeoWorld also published "Reflected in Water: OGC's Global Mission and Challenges" by OGC's President and CEO Mark Reichardt. It highlights the work of OGC members to advance standards for improved interoperability of scientific and research activities involving ocean science, hydrology and climate.
The editor introduced the April issue of GIM International with remarks about the Immaturity of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs). Interoperability and standards are common problems in SDI development, and that observation served as the transition to mention of the issue's interview with OGC's CEO and President, Mark Reichardt, "The Great Standardisation Payoff." In recognition of OGC's fifteenth anniversary, some questions covered history — what role the OGC played in the aftermath of 9/11, how membership has grown. Topics also included how OGC is funded and why it makes standards available for free, and the benefits of membership and advantages of interoperability. Some questions focused on the future — plans to reach out to South America and Africa, and the work of OGC members on security and access issues.
On 31 March, the editorial in GeoWorld, "Interoperability: A Word Befitting its Importance," highlights OGC and standards as part of the issue's topic, interoperability, and points out that all the work being done to facilitate interoperability signals the importance of the geospatial technologies worldwide.
The Winter 2009 issue of Imaging Notes includes "Web Services for Imaging Workflow: Chaining" by OGC's Executive Director of Outreach and Community Adoption, Sam Bacharach. The ORCHESTRA project is identified as using chaining, in which a web service calls a web service. In the experimental setting of the OGC Web Services - 6 (OWS-6) testbed activity, a Geoprocessing Workflow thread "involves service chaining with particular emphasis on ensuring authenticity, integrity, quality and confidentiality of services and information in OWS service chains."
The March issue of GIS Development carried an article by OGC's Director of Business Development, Louis Hecht, "Integration - key to optimization." Topics include building information models, the Delhi Transportation/Routing Interoperability (DTRIP) Pilot Initiative, CityGML and the AECOO testbed.
The same issue of GIS Development carried "Convergence is still the key. Implementation leads the way!" OGC is mentioned for the role of OGC standards in the integration of CAD, GIS and BIM.
And the March issue of GIS Development carried "A mega confluence of global experts." This report on the Map World Forum held in February identifies OGC's President and CEO Mark Reichardt as a member of the panel that discussed "Public Private Partnership: Challenges and Opportunities," and identifies OGC as recipient of a GIS Development Geospatial Excellence Award in the category of Professional Societies for its outstanding services/contribution to geospatial community worldwide.
OGC Press Releases
Call for Sponsors: Climate Challenge Integration Plugfest at FOSS4G
June 11, 2009
OGC Calls for Sponsors for Major Interoperability Testbed
June 1, 2009
OGC Announces June 9 Asia-Pacific Webinar Demo of OWS-6 Interoperability Testbed Results
May 27, 2009
OGC Announces June 10 Webinar Demo of OWS-6 Interoperability Testbed Results
May 26, 2009
OGC Announces 3D Fusion Summit
May 7, 2009
OGC Announces Sensor Web Enablement Summit
May 6, 2009
OGC Announces Geospatial Rights Management Summit
May 6, 2009
OGC to Demonstrate Interoperability for Building Energy and Construction Costs
May 5, 2009
OGC Releases Discussion Papers: Uncertainty Markup Language and OGC WCS Extension for netCDF Weather Data
April 23, 2009
OGC Forms Hydrology and Meteorology Domain Working Groups
April 22, 2009
OGC Announces April 29 Webinar Demo of OWS-6 Interoperability Testbed Results
April 21, 2009
OGC Calls for Comment on revision to OGC Web Services Common Standard
April 20, 2009
OGC Calls for Proposals for Empire Challenge 09 Pilot
April 17, 2009
NOAA Takes Principal Membership in the OGC(R)
April 09, 2009
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EVENTS
June 29-July 10, 2009
Vespucci summer institute 2009: 7th Annual Summer Institute on Geographic Information Science
Florence (Firenze), Italy
August 12 - 14, 2009
The 17th International Conference of Geoinformatics (Geoinformatics 2009)
George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA
September 28 - October 2, 2009
September '09 OGC Technical and Planning Committee Meetings
Darmstadt, Germany
December 7 - 11, 2009
December '09 OGC Technical and Planning Committee Meetings
Mountainview, CA, USA
For further info on events please contact gbuehler [at] opengeospatial.org (Greg Buehler).
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CONTACT
Please send comments and suggestions to:
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 2009 by the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.
