OGC Newsletter - June 2010

June 2010

CONTENTS
MESSAGE FROM STEVEN RAMAGE, THE NEWLY APPOINTED EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS
CTO's Report on June 2010 TC and PC Meeting
OGC'S NEW FAST TRACK STANDARDS PROCESS
PARTICIPATE IN THE JUNE 29 GEOSPATIAL LAW WEBINAR!
News and Opinion From the Blogosphere
OGC in Social Media
News Items

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MESSAGE FROM STEVEN RAMAGE, THE NEWLY APPOINTED EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS

Dear readers of the OGC News,

I would like to say a massive thank you for all the kind words of congratulations and support I have received from across the geospatial community. I am thrilled to be part of the OGC Executive Staff and looking forward to the challenge!

Lance McKee has also returned to OGC on a full-time, permanent basis as Senior Staff Writer. If any of you have worked with him you will know how lucky we are to have him on board - his work speaks volumes. Also Nadine Alameh, whom many of you know through her work in the OGC on behalf of NASA, is now helping George Percivall, David Arctur and Raj Singh, in her new role as Director, Interoperability Programs. So we are forging ahead.

One of the first things the team has supported me with is the creation of a series of free seminars (linked to the quarterly meetings), which provide a forum for discussing the value of geospatial standards. Return on investment is important for all organisations, but in terms of participating in geospatial standards development the methods for determining and measuring value vary greatly.

On Thursday 17th June, as part of the OGC's Technical Committee and Planning Committee meeting in Silver Spring in the USA, senior management, consultants, policy makers, and sales and marketing staff of OGC member organizations attended the first, half-day, non-technical session on "Deriving Business Value from Geospatial Standards". This event was well-attended and a series of discussions took place ranging from how to determine and measure value of geospatial standards through to how do you convince your senior management about the value of participating in an open consensus process! As a result of this lively debate it was agreed that more work is needed in this area and some members have suggested a Business Value Working Group. This may lead to an ad hoc meeting of this Group at the next TC meeting in Toulouse.

For geospatial technology providers and users, OGC compliance is also a critical business issue because interoperability is a critical requirement and providers must have a way to confirm that products and systems comply with the standards that enable interoperability. We encourage you to download the new OGC white paper on the OGC's Compliance and Interoperability Testing and Evaluation Program (CITE), which was approved last week by the OGC membership. On the same theme, the OGC is also seeking a Director of Interoperability Certification. If you're interested in this challenging and exciting opportunity please visit our website or contact George Percivall.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the Open Source GIS 2010 Conference at the University of Nottingham. As a result of our collaborative activities with the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, there is a white paper coming out soon around open standards and open source. I also attended the INSPIRE Conference in Krakow. It was a privilege to be part of this extremely well organised and successful event and also to bear witness to the INSPIRE Krakow Manifesto that was approved by attendees.

Thank you for your continued support in the open standards process and for reading the OGC Newsletter.

Best regards

Steven, on behalf of the OGC Staff

CTO'S REPORT ON JUNE 2010 TC AND PC MEETING

Hosted by the National Oceanographic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA), the 73rd OGC Technical Committee meetings were held the week of 14th June 2010 in Silver Spring, Maryland. Over 200 members attended and participated in the various Working Group sessions. In addition to the Working Group meetings, there was a very successful OGC Web Service 7 Test Bed demonstration and a NOAA OGC Interoperability day. A number of key document motions and policy changes were discussed and approved. One key policy change is that the OGC is moving from using "urns" to "http uri's" for referencing persistent OGC resources. This move brings the OGC work in line with current Web development best practices. Another key policy addition discussed is the OGC Fast Track process (see article below). This process is designed to accelerate the discussion and approval of candidate standards that are mature and widely implemented or are profiles of existing OGC standards.

 

A summary of the document motions from the Silver Spring meetings has been posted to OGCNetwork: http://www.ogcnetwork.net/node/1469. These are in draft format; please advise creed [at] opengeospatial.org)">Carl Reed of any changes or additions.

 

OGC'S NEW FAST TRACK STANDARDS PROCESS

Currently, most OGC standards development and revision work happens through Standards Working Groups (SWG) and the OGC Requests for Comment (RFC) process. A new standard or a revision to an existing standard typically requires 12 to 18 months from the formation of the SWG to formal adoption of the candidate standard¹. However, there are two principal cases in which the OGC's current well-known process may be unnecessarily slow and complicated.

In the first case, an organization seeks to bring a fully mature, widely implemented de-facto standard into the OGC for approval as an OGC standard. In the second case, an organization, or more often, an information community, develops a profile (such as the Simple Features profile of GML) of an OGC standard and seeks to have the OGC membership adopt the profile as an OGC standard.

For each of these cases, the OGC membership is currently piloting mechanisms for fast tracking of standards. The OGC Fast Track process will take a specification from "candidate standard" to "adopted standard" as quickly as possible, while still adhering to OGC policies and procedures AND maintaining the consensus process. A key aspect of both options is that a Standards Working Group (SWG) is not required. The choice of which Fast Track option to use will be decided by the candidate standard submission team in concert with OGC staff and the OGC Architecture Board.

For more information about the pending Fast Track process, contact creed [at] opengeospatial.org (Carl Reed).

¹See details in the OGC Technical Committee Policies and Procedures and associated OGC FAQ and “How To” documents.

PARTICIPATE IN THE JUNE 29 GEOSPATIAL LAW WEBINAR!

Directions Magazine will hold a Geospatial Law Webinar on June 29^th for executives in companies and agencies interested in privacy, licensing, data quality, and legislative issues related to geospatial data and technology. OGC Board director Kevin Pomfret, who chairs the OGC Board’s Spatial Law and Policy Committee, will lead this webinar. Kara John of DMTI and Pete Schreiber of ESRI will be panelists. They will discuss issues relevant to current events, such as the privacy issues raised about Facebook and Internet privacy legislation now being debated in the U.S. House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet. Learn more about the webinar at https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/260933274 .

NEWS AND OPINION FROM THE BLOGOSPHERE

On June 9, Geoff Zeiss, in his "Between the Poles" blog, reported on Geospatial Tech Day June 8 in Washington, DC. Robert W. Burkhardt, the Army Geospatial Information Officer (GIO), was the keynote speaker. Burkhardt identified open geospatial standards as one the major advances enabling sharing of geospatial data and mentioned OGC and other standards development organizations.

Sean Gorman wrote on 9 June 2010 in Off the Map, the FortiusOne blog, "An Open Data Litmus Test: Is There a Download Button?": "It has been great to see a dialog emerge on open data surrounding ESRI's merging of Geodata.gov and Data.gov. ... It was great to get the clarification that ESRI will be implementing the OGC CSW standard. A standard is always better than a proprietary format or approach. Folks may disagree but I'll go a step further and say a Web aligned standard is most often better than a GIS standard.” Sean goes on to discuss the OGC Catalog Services – Web (CSW) Interface Standard and the OGC discussion paper on creating OpenSearch Geospatial Extensions.

Guilhem Vellut lets his blog  readers know about the OGC’s Table Joining Service candidate standard.

Cameron Shorter's 8 April 2010 blog post, "2 International GeoSpatial Standards meetings coming to Australia", is about the International Organization for Standardization Technical Committee on Geographic information/Geomatics (ISO/TC211) and the OGC holding their Technical Meetings at the same location in Australia in November and December 2010. Cameron's paper for the April 2010 FIG Congress 2010, "Overview of Geospatial Open Source Software which is Robust, Feature Rich and Standards Compliant", begins, "Standards from the Open Geospatial Consortium enable the sharing of data across agencies and applications, interoperably.”

On Stanislav Sumbera's "Geospatial Haiku" blog, his 25 February 2010 post is titled, "Overlay WMS on Google in Silverlight Bing". This followed a post titled, "Overlay WMS on Google in OpenLayers."

OGC IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Twitter

Register on http://twitter.com/opengis to receive twitter notices of OGC press releases and other “tweets” about OGC.

 

LinkedIn

If you’re on LinkedIn, we invite you to join the OGC staff’s two LinkedIn Groups – the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and Geospatial Data Integration.

 

OGC Forum

OGC provides the OGC Forum [http://www.ogcnetwork.net/forum/ ], which is actually a collection of forums on a variety of topics, mostly technical. Some of the topics are quite active, and all are followed by OGC staff and by experts from the OGC’s member organizations. So those who post questions and comments can expect prompt responses from at least one knowledgeable person.

 

Delicious

See http://delicious.com/tag/ogcdoc for recent OGCdoc bookmarks. (Several OGC staff and members are working to make OGC documents more accessible to everyone using Delicious, a social bookmarking tool. See details at http://www.ogcnetwork.net/ogcdoc.) Here are some of the pages bookmarked by OGC’s Carl Reed (see http://delicious.com/CarlReedOGC/wms ):

 

08 JUN 10 SEAMONSTER: A wireless Sensor Web prototype applied to studying glaciated watersheds The SouthEast Alaska MOnitoring Network for Science, Telecommunications, Education and Research (SEAMONSTER) Sensor Web is operating in partially glaciated watersheds on the margin of the Juneau Ice Field. CarlReedOGC TAGS wcs swe kml ogcdoc

 

02 JUN 10 Open GeoSMS Standard in Taiwan (2010) Open GeoSMS could enable users of one handset platform to receive map information and LBS (location based services) from other platforms. GeoSMS has been submitted to the OGC as a candidate standard. CarlReedOGC TAGS geosms ogcdoc

 

26 MAY 10 METROGIS FIRST GENERATION GEOSERVICES FINDER PROJECT REPORT (2007) The purpose of this project was to determine the feasibility of building and supporting a web-based application that could search for and access Geographic Information System (GIS) software and applications. CarlReedOGC TAGS wms wfs iso-19115 ogcdoc

 

Test bed for geoservices on the osb (Dutch Governmental service bus) (2010) This report contains the results of a project named "Test bed for geoservices on the OSB (Dutch Governmental service bus" and register). …. During the project a test bed was developed to investigate whether two important geo-services, Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS), can be invoked according to the OSB standards. CarlReedOGC TAGS wms wfs soap wsdl ogcdoc

13 MAY 10 OGC Standards for Emergency Services (2010) Presentation by George Percivall to SDO Emergency Services Coordination Workshop (ESW-7) 11-13 May 2010. CarlReedOGC TAGS ogcdoc wfs gml georss wmc swe openls wms

 

NEWS ITEMS

OGC, CEN/TC 287 and ISO/TC 211 Agree to Increase Coordination

The CEN/TC 287 workshop on best practice for National Spatial Data Infrastructures (NSDIs) convened in Saint-Denis, Paris, France on 1 March 2010. This provided an excellent venue and opportunity for organizational representatives of CEN/TC 287, ISO/TC 211 and OGC to discuss ways in which coordination between these standards bodies can be improved to better address European and international standards requirements.  Discussions also included representatives from participating user communities, and led to general agreement for closer, more formal cooperation between OGC and CEN/TC 287, as well as agreement to consider continued improvements in OGC and ISO/TC 211 coordination. Emphasis was also placed on the testing of standards for viability, fulfillment of purpose, ease of implementation and improvements in interoperability. The mantra "test early, test often" was reflective of this need.

These three organizations will be cooperatively exploring the adoption of a common Change Request / Requirements registry, and will be examining ways in which adopted standards schema can be managed more effectively and efficiently across these organizations. The requirements process is also an effort to make the standards process more transparent and more responsive to community needs. All requirements and change requests will be gathered in an open forum visible to the public. All parties agreed that continued exploration of  process improvements would be valuable to the community, with particular focus on improved coordination, reduction in duplication of effort, and streamlining of standards coordination processes.

OGC Hosts Haiti Toolkit Web Portal

Industry representatives are working with the US National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) to develop a reconstruction coordination toolkit for the earthquake-devastated nation of Haiti (see NIBS Building Sciences monthly e-newsletter for February). The OGC agreed to host a web portal to help committees who are working on the project to share information and documents quickly and efficiently. The Haiti portal is based on the portal developed by the OGC for its own use. The OGC is already hosting a web page (http://www.ogcnetwork.net/networks/haiti) that provides links to Earth images, maps and other geospatial data that are being used in Haiti earthquake disaster relief.

If you have information about other OGC-enabled data portals, clients or services being used to support the Haitian relief effort, please let us know by posting a comment. (Click on the red "add new comment" link at the bottom of the page).  We want aid workers to know about all of these, we want owners of web-based catalogs that use OGC's Catalogue Service Web standard to harvest and publish these links, and we want to raise awareness of how OGC's open standards help mobilize information and applications for improved response to disasters.

OGC has sent information about these resources to information technologists at the Red Cross, UN, and other relief groups. If you know of others who might find these resources helpful, please forward this information to them.

Free Book Offers Great Introduction to Sensor Web Enablement Standards

A new book "SANY - an open service architecture for sensor networks," available free at http://sany-ip.eu/publications/3317,  provides an excellent introduction to OGC's Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards. SANY stands for "Sensors Anywhere." As a major Integrated Project in the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) of the European Commission, SANY extends the interoperability advances of an earlier European project, ORCHESTRA, into the domain of environmental sensor networks and standards-based sensor web enablement to support decision-making.

SDOs Coordinate on Building Information Model Standards

In February, the OGC and another standards development organization (SDO), the buildingSMART alliance ^TM (bSa), released a report, "Summary of the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Owner Operator Phase 1 (AECOO-1) Joint Testbed." The report summarizes results of a nine-month effort in the OGC's Interoperability Program to increase interoperability among software used by architects, construction companies, cost estimators and building energy analysts.

The AECOO-1 Testbed was jointly led by the bSa and the OGC, with participation from architecture firms, general contractors, government agencies, and trade associations including the American Institute of Architects and the Large Firm Roundtable. This collaboration has brought the OGC into a new industry domain, opening up new opportunities for our members.

The Testbed resulted in ideas for improved ways of using the bSa's Industry Foundation Class (IFC) standards in the areas of building energy analysis and building component accounting. It also clarified the opportunities for modernization of the IFCs and has underscored the need for closer coordination of OGC with bSa and other AEC trade organizations and standards bodies. 

Many OGC technology-provider members already provide both geospatial and computer-aided design (CAD) software and services, so they understand the important supporting role that geospatial technologies play in the AEC industry. They and their customers also see the importance of creating an open Building Information Models (BIM) standards framework to make AECOO business processes more efficient.

Many members in the OGC are also interested in indoor location, and though this was not a focus in AECOO-1, it may be in follow-on activities. Partly as a result of the rapid uptake of the OGC's CityGML standard, OGC is involved in discussions about new projects that involve indoor location, including the Open Floor Plan Display/Exchange (OFPD/X) effort and the International Justice and Public Safety Network's Geospatial Service Oriented Architecture for Public Safety (GeoSOAPS).

Author Requests Reviews of Proposed URN Namespace

Sean Leonard has posted a draft document titled A Uniform Resource Name (URN) Namespace for Transaction Identifiers to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) website, and has requested reviews. The abstract:

Transaction identifiers are used throughout modern commerce to memorialize particular economic events.  This document describes a Uniform Resource Name (URN) namespace that contains transaction identifiers.

GSDI World Conference Invites Submissions

The Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) Association 12^th World Conference will be held in Singapore 19-22 October 2010. The conference is on twitter at http://twitter.com/gsdi12. OGC will be providing a keynote at this international event. 

 

NEW MEMBERS

OGC welcomes new members who joined us recently.

AWS Convergence Technologies (Associate) (United States)

Case, Tim (Individual) (United States)

Deltares USA Inc. (Research Institute / Not For Profit Institute) (United States)

Federal Institute of Hydrology (BfG) (Associate) (Germany)

Konkuk University (University) (Korea, Republic of)

Landcare Research New Zealand Limited (Associate) (New Zealand)

Technology Development Forum (TDF); (Tehnoloģiju Attīstības forums) (Research Institute / Not For Profit Institute) (Latvia)

University of Heidelberg, Chair of GIScience (University) (Germany)

 

OGC IN THE NEWS

OGC In The News

These articles and columns mentioning OGC appeared in the press this year and that were not listed in the March edition of OGC News.

 

OGC Accepts Externally Developed Specifications
Mark Reichardt
GeoWorld
2010-06-15

 

Standards in policy: Maximise value of data
Steven Ramage
GIS Development
2010-06-01

 

Computing Clouds Cast Geospatial Vision
Cheryl Gerber
Geospatial Intelligence Forum
2010-05-03

 

Unifying Isolated Sensor Systems Using Web 2.0 and Open Standards
David Resseguie, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Scott Fairgrieve, Northrop Grumman
Sensors
2010-05-01

 

Geospatial intelligence - Revolution in national interest
Dr. Khalid A. Rahman Al-Haidan, Director of GIS Directorate, Central Informatics Organization, Kingdom of Bahrain
GIS Development
2010-05-01

 

Semantic Enablement for Spatial Data Infrastructures
Krzysztof Janowicz et al from the Department of Geography at Pennsylvania State University, the Institute for Environment and Sustainability European Commission – Joint Research Centre, 52° North, and the Institute for Geoinformatics at the University of Transactions in GIS
2010-04-15

 

Agile Earth Observation
Mark Reichardt
Geospatial Intelligence Forum
2010-04-01

 

The application of open standards to enhance the interoperability of geoscience information
George Percivall
International Journal of Digital Earth
2010-04-01

 

Implementing Geospatial Web Services: A Resource Webliography
Cynthia Dietz
Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship
2010-04-01

 

Groups Want Standards Bodies to Help Minimize Market Confusion Over the Term 'BIM'
Steve Rizer
Construction Advisor Today
2010-03-25

 

AECOO-1: A First Step Towards Web-based “Big BIM” Standards
Louis Hecht and Deke Smith
Vector One
2010-03-22

 

The GEOSS Architecture Implementation Pilot Enters Phase 3
George S. Percivall, OGC
GEO News
2010-02-19

 

OGC candidate 3D Standards
Prof. Dr. Alexander Zipf, University of Heidelberg
Geo:connexion
2010-02-17

 

Live Geography – Embedded Sensing for Standardised Urban Environmental Monitoring
Bernd Resch, Manfred Mittlboeck, Fabien Girardin, Rex Britter, and Carlo Ratti
International Journal on Advances in Systems and Measurements
2009-12-31

Press Releases

OGC and AGISEE begin activities in South-East Europe
June 16, 2010

lat/lon Takes Principal Membership in the OGC(R)
June 2, 2010

The OGC Seeks Participants for Surface Water Interoperability Experiment
May 13, 2010

Nadine Alameh Joins OGC as Director, Interoperability Programs
May 6, 2010

Lance McKee Joins OGC as Senior Staff Writer
May 6, 2010

Steven Ramage joins Open Geospatial Consortium
May 4, 2010

OGC Standards a topic at EGU General Assembly
April 26, 2010

OGC Calls for Industry Input on multi-INT Decision Fusion
April 21, 2010

 

 

EVENTS

20th Anniversary Meeting on Cognitive and Linguistic Aspects of Geographic Space, Las Navas, Spain
July 4th, 2010 - July 10th, 2010

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software , Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
July 5th, 2010 - July 8th, 2010

ISPRS 40^th celebrations, Vienna, Austria
July 1-7, 2010

Map Asia 2010, Kuala Lumpur Malaysia
July 20th, 2010 - July 22nd, 2010

IGARSS conference , Honolulu, Hawaii
July 25th, 2010 - July 30th, 2010

GeoWeb 2010 - Vancouver, BC, Canada
July 26th, 2010

Map Africa 2010 - Cape Town, South Africa
November 23-25, 2010

EuroSDR - Distance elearning course - The INSPIRE Directive and its Implementing Rules. How to understand and apply them? Leuven, Belgium
August 30th, 2010 - September 10th, 2010

FOSS4G 2010, Barcelona Spain

September 6th, 2010 - September 9th, 2010

EuroSDR - Distance elearning course - Schema matching, mapping and transformation for INSPIRE
September 20th, 2010 - October 1st, 2010

OCEANS 2010 MTS/IEEE Seattle, Washington, USA
September 20th, 2010 - September 23rd, 2010

September 2010: OGC TC/PC Meetings , Meteo-France, France
September 20th, 2010 - September 24th, 2010

URISA 48th Annual Conference , Orlando, Florida
September 28th, 2010 - October 1st, 2010

GEOSS Workshop XXXIX, Santiago, Chile
October 3rd, 2010

ISPRS Latin American Remote Sensing conference , Santiago, Chile
October 4th, 2010 - October 8th, 2010

Spatial@gov, Canberra, Australia
Oct 4^th, 2010

GSDI 12 World Conference: Realising Spatially Enabled Societies - Singapore
October 19th, 2010 - October 22nd, 2010

Proposals are due July 1 for the first Interoperability Tech Talks at the
USGIF GEOINT 2010 Symposium, held on Nov. 1-4, in New Orleans, La.

5th International 3D GeoInfo Workshop 2010 - Berlin, Germany
November 3rd, 2010 - November 4th, 2010

GEO Ministerial Summit and GEO VII Plenary, Beijing, China
November 3rd, 2010 - November 5th, 2010

ISPRS Commission IV midterm conference, Orlando, Florida
November 16th, 2010 - November 18th, 2010

December 2010: OGC TC/PC Meetings, Sydney Australia
November 28th, 2010 - December 3rd, 2010

ISO/TC211 31st Plenary & WG Meetings - Canberra, Australia
December 5th, 2010 - December 10th, 2010

June 2011: OGC TC/PC Meetings, Taichung, Taiwan
June 5th, 2011 - June 11th, 2011

25th International Conference and 15th General Assembly of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) Paris, France
July 3-8, 2011.

OGC members in Asia Pacific: Steven Ramage calls on you to help him with the workshop he is running at Map Asia 2010 in July! Examples of OGC standards in use would be helpful for this workshop.

For further information on events please contact outreach [at] opengeospatial.org

 

CONTACT

Please send comments and suggestions to:

Lance McKee
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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