OGC Newsletter - December 2010
December 2010
CONTENTS
THIS MONTH'S MESSAGECTO'S REPORT ON NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2010 TC AND PC MEETINGPARLEZ-VOUS FRANÇAIS? – OGC'S REGIONAL FORUMSWEBSITE OF THE MONTH: BHUVANOGC: 2010 THE YEAR IN REVIEWTWO MUST-SEE VIDEOSGML APPLICATION SCHEMAS GAINING MOMENTUMNEW MEMBERSOGC PRESS COVERAGE, TUTORIALS, VIDEOS, PRESENTATIONS, PAPERS AND BLOGS OGC PRESS RELEASESNEW COMPLIANT PRODUCTSSPECIAL INVITATIONSUPCOMING EVENTSCONTACTSUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE
Back issues of OGC News are available.
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By darctur [at] opengeospatial.org (David Arctur)
Director, Interoperability Programs
Whenever a large office building is being constructed, it seems like a long time goes by at first, with very little visible progress. The foundation and infrastructure are often below ground level and behind a fence, making it even harder to see progress. But once the walls start to go up, every day brings dramatic changes.
We seem to have reached the "wall building" stage now, regarding OGC standards in the geosciences. It was just 2 years ago, after 16 years of work within OGC on the core standards for mapping and sensor observations, that we first talked with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) about letting us help shape their future standards. At the ‘First workshop on use of GIS/OGC standards in meteorology' OGC and WMO both realized that many members of the meteorology community were using OGC WMS, WCS, and WFS standards in interesting ways, but different than we expected, and not all the same, handling some concepts that were new for us, such as forecast time and mapping of weather variables like temperature and pressure. The workshop, organized by the UK Met Office, the European Centre for Mid to Long Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF), and Météo France, was a first attempt to determine best practices for using and extending OGC standards in European meteorology.
Similarly in the hydrology field, the US-based Consortium for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science (CUAHSI) had been working for 8 years to evolve a service-oriented architecture for cataloguing time-series observations from the millions of stream gauges in the US maintained by USGS, EPA, NOAA's National Weather Service, and various state agencies. As this system was coming online and being adopted within USGS and NWS, CUAHSI realized that OGC could help ensure global application of the architecture. They started working with us to adapt their initial customized SOA to OGC standards, which turned out to be a good fit. But they realized the need to draw in more hydrology domain scientists, so CUAHSI sent OGC to the WMO Commission for Hydrology (CHy) meeting in Geneva, just a couple weeks before the first meteorology workshop, to see what we could develop.
From the serendipity of these two meetings being co-located with meetings of the WMO's key domains grew a commitment between OGC and WMO, formalized a year later, to support each other's standards program through designated experts chairing the relevant working groups in both organizations. This goes beyond meteorology and hydrology to include climate, oceanography, and atmospheric science commissions within WMO. This ensures that WMO retains intellectual control of the domain sciences of concern to them within OGC, while taking advantage of OGC's strengths in convening interdisciplinary collaborative meetings four times a year, around the world.
Steven Ramage and I recently attended the ‘Third workshop on use of GIS/OGC standards in meteorology' hosted by the UK Met Office at their facilities in Exeter, co-sponsored again by ECMWF and Météo France. The meeting was attended by experts representing national agencies in weather, climate, aviation, and defence from Europe and now North America. (NOAA will host the 2011 workshop). This year, OGC members on the European INSPIRE Thematic Working Group on Atmospheric Conditions and Meteorological Geographic Features are planning to implement the INSPIRE requirements for a limited part of the complete information model, through an OGC Interoperability Experiment.
Still another thread of geosciences outreach for OGC is our participation in the annual conferences of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco each fall, and the European Geophysical Union (EGU) in Vienna each spring. We have chaired sessions at these conferences since 2008 within a newly created domain section of both called Earth and Space Science Informatics (ESSI). At the AGU meeting just held, we saw that OGC standards and practices are being included in the core architectures of important new NSF-funded observation networks and archives, such as DataONE.org and IEDAData.org. We also see new areas we need to work with, such as provenance automation and integrated modeling frameworks. As an indication of growing recognition of the role we can play in fostering interdisciplinary collaborations of domain scientists and cyber-infrastructure developers, we have been asked to be a sponsor at ESSI's future meetings and to contribute to its publications. The future for geosciences in the OGC is bright!
On behalf of everyone on the OGC staff, I thank you for your support in 2010 and wish you all a very happy and successful 2011!
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CTO'S REPORT ON NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2010 TC AND PC MEETING
By creed [at] opengeospatial.org (Carl Reed)
Executive Director, Specification Program, CTO
For the first time ever, the OGC Technical and Planning Committee meetings were hosted in Australia. Sponsored by CSIRO and hosted at the University of Sydney, over 120 professionals participated in the meetings. The Australian community was very well represented and exhibited a continued high interest and commitment to the OGC and the use of OGC standards. Thirty two different OGC Working Groups met and worked on revisions to existing OGC standards, discussed requirements and use cases, tangled with procedural and policy changes, and worked on several new OGC standards. Further, there were over 50 presentations on the use of OGC standards. These presentations included updates on the Hydrology Interoperability Experiments, OGC Web Services Testbed 8.0, deployment of OGC standards in warning and alerting applications, and ongoing OGC related standards work in numerous domains, such as Aviation, 3D, Meteorology, and Hydrology.
Thanks to everyone who made the journey (short and long!) and helped make the Sydney meetings very successful and productive.
A slide set containing information on the approved motions and informative announcements can be downloaded from the portal:
http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=42039.
Cheers!
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PARLEZ-VOUS FRANÇAIS? – OGC'S REGIONAL FORUMS
By atrakas [at] opengeospatial.org (Athina Trakas)
Director, European Services
Language as well as cultural, political and administrative factors shape our work, thinking and decisions.
As an international standards body that is addressing requirements and challenges from various communities related to geospatial and location topics, the OGC addresses region-specific circumstances to a certain extent within its membership and work. This is done through cooperation among Consortium members in a regional and national context and has led to various OGC forum activities around the world.
Those activities reflect the needs and culture of OGC members' regions or countries, and they promote dialogue within a single culture, language and/or political context. But there's no blueprint for all forums. They vary not only in the above-mentioned aspects, but also in their organisation, the connection to stakeholder communities and leading players in each country.
The OGC's emphasis on forum activities helps to bridge gaps between various members. There are currently 7 active forums - all different in languages and organised differently: the French Forum, the Iberian and Latin-American Forum (ILAF), the India Forum, the Italian Forum, the Korea Forum, the South-East European Forum, and the UK & Ireland Forum.
Our European forums activities help the OGC gain stakeholder confidence in programs like INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) and other National Spatial Data Infrastructure programs, and these activities lead to better cooperation with government bodies such as the European Commission.
The OGC's international standardization community benefits from regional forums because they help to make OGC standards truly international. International standards must accommodate as many national and regional requirements and priorities as possible. Also, uptake and deployment of international standards depend on outreach activities consistent with the language, culture, policy and political environment of many nations and regions.
The organisational structure of the current active forums are quite different. In some cases they involve simply an email reflector for information and discussions, and in other cases they involve regular meetings, maintenance of public websites and the organisation of Interoperability Days. What is common to all of the OGC's regional forums is that they depend on the leadership and participation of OGC members in a country or region for their success.
In the next newsletter we will provide a more detailed description of the various activities in one of the OGC regional forums.
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Bhuvan (the name is derived from Bhuvana, the Sanskrit word for Earth) is an initiative of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Department of Space, Government of India, to showcase Indian Earth Observation capabilities from the IRS series of satellites. The images showcased on Bhuvan are from Multi-sensor, Multi-platform and Multi-temporal domains with capabilities to overlay thematic information, interpreted from such imagery, as vector layers.
All the Ministries involved in managing natural resources in the country at National to local level become part of Bhuvan, as the national imperative applications are done jointly with them. This one-stop versatile Indian Earth Observation visualization system can be of vital use for planners, decision makers, social groups, village communities and individuals. Bhuvan provides a gateway to explore and discover the virtual Earth in 2-Dimensional, 3-Dimensional space with tremendous possibilities for adding value at the user end.
Bhuvan enables users to share and overlay maps and geospatial feature data through services that implement the OGC Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS) interface standards and the OGC KML encoding standard. These services are hosted by ISRO's National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC). Bhuvan's versatile tools support development of interactive applications for visualization, query and analysis.
The Bhuvan 2D interface is built using OpenLayers - a popular, open source WMS client. The 2D map browser provides map navigation, map panning, line drawing, point polygon, overview map, linear and areal measurement, and search. A downloadable plug-in provides "fly-over" viewing capabilities with interactive manipulation of view angle, distance, elevation and motion in a 3D landscape. Bhuvanites (Bhuvan Users) can create and place 3D models, 3D polygons, take "snapshots", measure distances and perform shadow analyses.
Various services available in Bhuvan, such as land services, weather services, disaster services and ocean services cater to specific needs of the scientific community and administrators, supporting their efforts to provide societal value.
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Below are some highlights of the OGC's 16th year:
- Despite difficult world economic conditions, the OGC continued its year-over-year membership growth.
- Two additional OGC Interoperability Program Director staff, Nadine Alameh and Luis Bermudez, were hired to provide highly skilled expertise to IP initiatives. Both have PhDs in their chosen areas. Lance McKee, a long-time consultant to OGC, joined the staff as full-time Senior Staff Writer and Steven Ramage (previously the OGC business representative at 1Spatial) joined to head up marketing and communications.
- Two new membership levels, Associate GovFuture Local Membership and Associate GovFuture Subnational Membership, were added in November to increase participation by local, state and provincial organizations. The GovFuture focus is not standards development, but rather implementation, business value, "best practice" and virtual forums (teleconferences, webinars, email lists, access to the OGC Portal etc.).
- A Business Value Committee (a subcommittee of the Planning Committee) was chartered to help shape the message of value related to participation in the OGC and the value of implementing OGC standards. The new committee has a Chair from MobiLaps currently working at NASA, Marge Cole and two Vice Chairs, Emmanuel Mondon from Erdas in Europe and Kylie Armstrong from CRC-SI/Landgate in Australia.
- In 2010, the OGC Specification Program witnessed its highest level of standards activity since OGC's inception. Over 30 Standards Working Groups were active in 2010. Lifecycle maintenance of existing OGC standards has become a new priority. The following candidate standards were approved in 2010:
- Abstract Specifications Approved in 2010:
- Linear Referencing
- Observations and Measurements Model
- OGC Standards Approved in 2010:
- Web Coverage Service 2.0
- CS-W ebRIM for EO 1.0
- Web Feature Service 2.0
- Filter Encoding 2.0
- SWE Common 2.0
- Sensor Planning Service 2.0
- SWE Services Model 2.0
- Table Join Service 1.1
- GML Simple Features profile 1.1
- Abstract Specifications Approved in 2010:
- The following candidate standards are scheduled for completion in mid to late 2011.
- OGC Standards in-progress for approval in 2010 and 2011:
- Moving Object Snapshot (GML)
- SensorML 2.0
- CityGML 2.0
- WMS 2.0
- WPS 2.0
- GML 3.3
- GeoSMS 1.0
- Geosynchronization 1.0
- GeoXACML 1.1
- GML in JP 2000 2.0
- EO Metadata Profile for O&M
- GeoAPI 3.0
- OMXML (Observations and Measurements - XML Schema)
- GeoSPARQL1.0
- cf-NetCDF 1.0
- OWS Context
- Ordering Service 1.0
- PubSub 1.0
- Simple Features 2.0
- WFS Gazetteer application profile
- Two candidate standards in progress are likely to play an important role in consumer applications and other application domains. The first is the candidate Open GeoSMS standard, which defines a short messaging service (SMS) encoding to exchange lightweight location information between different mobile devices or applications. The second is the OGC candidate GeoSynchronization Service Standard that describes an open standard interface to a software service. It allows data collectors to propose changes to be made to a data provider's geospatial features (such as data about property lines, city population, vehicle location, etc.).
- OGC Standards in-progress for approval in 2010 and 2011:
- The Interoperability Program completed the following activities in 2010:
- Testbeds: The OGC Web Services Phase 7 (OWS-7) Testbed completed successfully. The OWS-8 Testbed planning completed with the release of a Request for Quotation / Call For Participation on 22 November. This $1.8M testbed is supported by ten US and European government and industry sponsors, and will conduct activity threads for Observation Fusion, Geosynchronization, Aviation, and Cross-Community Interoperability (data model semantics).
- A major Fusion Standards Study commissioned by the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency generated key industry and OGC member recommendations on sensor, feature and decision fusion standards, several of which have been addressed in OWS-7 and OWS-8 testbeds.
- Pilot Initiatives
- The OGC completed phase 3 of the Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS) Architecture Implementation Pilot.
- GEOSS, INSPIRE and GMES an Action in Support (GIGAS) - OGC's technical and program support to the multi-year European GIGAS project concluded in June 2010 with the issuance of final GIGAS architectural recommendations.
- OGC's participation in a European FP7 EO2HEAVEN project commenced in the latter half of 2010. This multi-year project involves the OGC and FP7 consortium partners like iGSI conducting pilot initiatives related to health surveillance via standards-based Earth Observation and other techniques.
- FAA Special Activity Airspace Information Dissemination Pilot - will work to further extend the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) System Wide Information Management (SWIM) Architecture to employ OGC web services. This effort builds on previous testbed activities.
- The OGC completed phase 3 of the Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS) Architecture Implementation Pilot.
- Interoperability Experiments
- The OGC Hydrology Domain Working Group is advancing two key Interoperability Experiments for Surface Water and Ground Water.
- The Authentication Interoperability Experiment is working to test standards-based mechanisms to transfer authentication between various OGC services.
- The Shibboleth Interoperability Experiment commenced in 2010 to advance best practices for implementing standards on federated security in transactions involving geospatial data and services.
- The OGC Hydrology Domain Working Group is advancing two key Interoperability Experiments for Surface Water and Ground Water.
- Several new OGC IP initiatives are being formalized:
- Department of Homeland Security Sensor Standards Recommendation Study 3D Portrayal Interoperability Experiment
- Participation in a proposal to the European Commission regarding the Future Internet (FP7-2011-ICT-FI).
- Department of Homeland Security Sensor Standards Recommendation Study 3D Portrayal Interoperability Experiment
- Testbeds: The OGC Web Services Phase 7 (OWS-7) Testbed completed successfully. The OWS-8 Testbed planning completed with the release of a Request for Quotation / Call For Participation on 22 November. This $1.8M testbed is supported by ten US and European government and industry sponsors, and will conduct activity threads for Observation Fusion, Geosynchronization, Aviation, and Cross-Community Interoperability (data model semantics).
- A new OGC Standards Fast Track process was developed and implemented in 2010. This new process is in testing through the end of 2010. The Fast Track process speeds up the overall time taken to approve a candidate standard and will allow staff to better engage in certain standards activities in areas such as lightweight standards for the Mass Market (consumer applications), to benefit Members and the IT community.
- Cooperation continued between the OGC Specification Program and other standards organizations to ensure that location content and service instances remain as consistent as possible through the standards stack as used in other domains. Success continues in OASIS, the IETF, ISO and the National Emergency Number Association (NENA). For example, a variety of OGC GML application schemas are part of mandatory standards for use in the Next Generation 911 program in North America.
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Professor Steve Liang's GeoCENS (Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure for Environmental Sensing) group at the University of Calgary (an OGC member) developed a wonderful short video for a recent workshop in Banff. GeoCENS is an open standard-based virtual globe sensor web browser for the biogeosciences. You can navigate the virtual globe to your area of interests, and discover/query sensor readings (both real-time and historical data). Try it!
A new video, "Automatic installation and operation of sensors in an IP network," from MBARI and SARTI demonstrates how "plug and play" for oceanographic instruments can be accomplished using standard PUCK and SensorML protocols. More information and software are available at http://www.mbari.org/pw, http://www.cdsarti.org and http://www.52north.org.
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GML APPLICATION SCHEMAS GAINING MOMENTUM
2010 has seen considerable OGC GML Application Schema development activity, both within OGC and in independent efforts. A list of GML application schemas has been posted and others are under development. Several OGC Technical Committee Domain Working Groups - Aviation, Hydrology, and Meteorology & Oceanography - have formed primarily to develop GML Application Schemas.
GML provides the basis for community-specific "Application Schemas" that support data interoperability within geospatial communities of interest. Such communities benefit from OGC's unique offering of structure, process, standards expertise and outreach support. Participation provides national government agencies with a very cost-effective means of meeting their international cooperation goals.
In the recent LinkedIn discussion in the GML Group, Ron Lake stated: "GML was not designed primarily to support file exchange - meaning that it was designed to enable data feeds of geographic content and transactions. This is borne out in its use in WFS (transactions/requests) and GeoRSS (GML) in data feeds. Note that GML is also used as a storage model (see CityGML) and as a basis for complex data feeds (AIXM)." This is a good description of the versatility and usefulness of GML.
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OGC welcomes new members who joined us recently.
Arizona Geological Survey (GovFuture-Subnational) (United States)
Bayley, Peter (Individual) (Australia)
ConceptSolutions, LLC (Associate) (United States)
Data & Image Processing Consultants, LLC (DIPCON) (Small Company) (United States)
Database Lab, University of A Coruña (University) (Spain)
L-3 STRATIS (Associate) (United States)
Marine Technology Unit (CSIC) (GovFuture-Subnational) (Spain)
McKenna, Jeff (Individual) (Canada)
Ministère des transports du Québec (MTQ) (GovFuture-Subnational) (Canada)
NJVC (Associate) (United States)
University of Washington (University) (United States)
Victorian Dept. of Primary Industries (GovFuture-Subnational) (Australia)
Wuxi SensingNet Industrialization Research Institute (Research Institute / Not For Profit Institute) (China)
Östling, Michael (Individual) (Sweden)
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OGC PRESS COVERAGE, TUTORIALS, VIDEOS, PRESENTATIONS, PAPERS AND BLOGS
See the OGC Press Coverage page for an updated chronological listing of articles, blog entries and papers about OGC and OGC standards.
See also the growing collection of OGC tutorials.
Participate in OGC-related social media:
- Twitter: Register to receive twitter notices of OGC press releases and other "tweets" about OGC. Follow OGC's Steven Ramage - "OGC_Steven" - on Twitter.
- LinkedIn: If you're on LinkedIn, we invite you to join the OGC staff's two LinkedIn Groups - the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Group and the Geospatial Data Integration Group.
- OGC Forum: OGC provides the OGC 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. Those who post questions and comments can expect prompt responses from at least one knowledgeable person.
- Delicious: Several OGC staff and members are working to make OGC documents more accessible to everyone using Delicious, a social bookmarking tool. We have links to about 300 references to articles, editorials, and OGC Engineering Reports on the use of OGC standards. See recent OGCdoc bookmarks and see details about this on the OGC Document Catalog page on OGC Network. For pages bookmarked by OGC's Carl Reed, see also CarlReedOGC's wms Bookmarks. Members: If you write or find interesting technical articles, editorials etc. on the use of OGC standards, please let rsingh [at] opengeospatial.org (Raj Singh) or creed [at] opengeospatial.org (Carl Reed) know, and they will update the Delicious catalogue.
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OGC issued a record number of press releases in 2010.
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The following products became Registered OGC-Compliant Products in the last 90 days.
GeoNURIS GeoWeb
Server (V1.0)
- CCI Co. Ltd. (
WMS 1.3.0, WFS 1.1.0)
OCCS Server (10) - airGmap Aerospace Technology Limited (WMS 1.1.1)
OIMS Server (10) - airGmap Aerospace Technology Limited (WMS 1.1.1)
OPCube (10) - airGmap Aerospace Technology Limited ( WMS 1.1.1)
TerraGate SFS (6.0) - Skyline Software Systems, Inc. (CAT 2.0.2)
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The organizers of the following events have invited OGC staff to participate as speakers and panelist, and they invite you to attend.
Defense Geospatial Intelligence DGI 2011
24-27 January 2011 at the QEII Centre, London, England
Defence Geospatial Intelligence (DGI) is Europe's largest and most international annual gathering dedicated to the high-level discussion of the importance and the major challenges of the use of geospatial intelligence in both defence and national security operations. DGI brings together 700 heads of Geospatial Intelligence, Remote Sensing, GIS Mapping, Satellite Imagery and Analysis within the Military, Governmental and National Security sectors. It attracts professionals who are responsible for using, and integrating, geo based capabilities in their operations and organisations. DGI provides a unique forum for defense intelligence to discuss and debate the development of geospatial intelligence capabilities across the globe in defence and security sectors.
Enterprise Strategies for Location Intelligence USA,
30-31 March 2011, Chicago, USA
Location intelligence services are being delivered via mobile devices, Web apps, Web platforms and the cloud. The geospatial elements of B2B and B2C value chains are evolving, and social networks, crowd-sourced data and open data are becoming enterprise issues. Standards are becoming more important even as new proprietary platforms compete for dominance. How can enterprises navigate this dynamic landscape to improve profitability and competitiveness?
The list of over 30 speakers features Raj Singh from OGC as well as
- Francis Rabuck, Director, Real Time Asset Labs of Bentley Systems
- Sj Camarata, Director, ESRI
- Ed Parsons, Geospatial Technologist, Google
- Xavier Lopez, Director Spatial & Semantic Technologies, Oracle
- Geoff Zeiss, Director of Technology of Autodesk
- Don Campbell, CTO Business Analytics, IBM
- Sean Gorman, CEO and Founder, FortiusOne
- Kevin Pomfret, Executive Director, Centre For Spatial Law and Policy
Call for Papers: Data Flow from Space to Earth: Applications and interoperability
21-23 March 2011, Venice, Italy
A huge amount of data is provided by Earth imaging satellites, but application development is limited by lack of interoperability. Authors interested in providing a paper for this conference, see the Call for Papers. Abstracts are due no later than 15 January 2011.
Geospatial Intelligence Middle East 2011
15-18 May 2011, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Geospatial Intelligence Middle East returns in 2011 for its fourth successful year. In recognition of the strategic importance of the UAE and its position as the world's fourth largest importer of weapons, for the first time ever the event will take place in the country's capital, Abu Dhabi.
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See the OGC Events List for notices of upcoming OGC events and events related to OGC standards activities.
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Please send comments and suggestions to:
Lance McKee
Senior Staff Writer and Editor of the 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
lmckee [at] opengeospatial.org
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Copyright 2010 by the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.
