OGC Newsletter - April 2011
April 2011
CONTENTS
THIS MONTH'S MESSAGE: WORKING ON THE NETWORKOGC IBERIAN AND LATIN-AMERICAN FORUM (ILAF)REPORT ON FEBRUARY/MARCH TC AND PC MEETINGSOWS-8'S SUCCESSFUL KICKOFFWEBSITE OF THE MONTH: PACIFIC DISASTER CENTER (PDC)CITYGML PODCASTS AND VIDEONEW MEMBERSOGC PRESS COVERAGE, TUTORIALS, VIDEOS, PRESENTATIONS, PAPERS AND BLOGS OGC PRESS RELEASESNEW COMPLIANT PRODUCTSSPECIAL INVITATIONSOTHER EVENTSCONTACTSUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE
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THIS MONTH'S MESSAGE: WORKING ON THE NETWORK
By sramage [at] opengeospatial.org (Steven Ramage)
Executive Director, Marketing and Communications
The global network of inter-communicating geospatial systems and devices is expanding at an ever-increasing rate. This is enabled in many places by the growing network of communities represented in OGC working groups. For those who are not familiar with the set up of the OGC, the OGC Technical Committee comprises Domain Working Groups and Standards Working Groups (as well as other sub committees). Many of these working groups are less than a year old:
- The Ordering Standards Working Group has brought forward the OGC Ordering Services for Earth Observation Products candidate standard based on an existing specification prepared and implemented in several ESA (European Space Agency) projects.
- The Publish/Subscribe (PubSub) Standards Working Group is developing the OGC PubSub candidate standard for geospatial applications that provide notification of events, such as a sensor reading falling below a certain threshold or new data becoming available at a service.
- The GeoSynchronization Service Standards Working Group is developing an OGC candidate standard for services that mediate interaction between geospatial data providers, content repositories, and external entities acting as data collectors.
- Just a year ago, the Aviation Domain Working Group formed to support the evaluation, advancement, operational use and validation of OGC standards within the Aviation domain.
- Last week the WaterML Standards Working Group announced OGC WaterML 2.0, a candidate standard for the representation of hydrological observations data.
- Also last week, the Open GeoSMS Standards Working Group announced Open GeoSMS, a candidate standard that enables developers to use extended Short Message Service (SMS) to communicate location content.
Each of these standards meets a critical need or set of needs, and that is why these working groups formed. The needs are global, so the communities chose to develop the standards in the OGC, or to bring local standards into the OGC’s international consensus process to make the standards global.
The communities and standards are diverse. For example, WaterML will be implemented and used by organizations involved in the science and management of water resources. Open GeoSMS, an extremely lightweight location standard, has the potential to affect billions of users.
Other communities are actively preparing to form working groups, so watch for more OGC announcements in the coming months. One hot technology domain where standardization discussions are underway is Augmented Reality, which overlaps the domains of location based services (LBS) and building information models (BIM). We expect the OGC CityGML standard to grow in importance in these domains. If you can, be sure to attend the Augmented Reality workshop that the OGC will host with Taiwanese members at the OGC meetings in Taichung, Taiwan in June 2011.
Thank you for your continued support and for reading this edition.
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OGC IBERIAN AND LATIN-AMERICAN FORUM (ILAF)
By atrakas [at] opengeospatial.org (Athina Trakas)
Director, European Services
More than five years ago organizations and individuals in Spain and Portugal began working together to promote the use of OGC standards in those countries’ Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) programs. As others became interested, meetings were held, often in conjunction with SDI meetings in the Iberian region. There are longstanding relationships between Spain and Portugal and the countries of Latin America, so when an official OGC forum was chartered in 2010 it was given the name ILAF (Iberian and Latin-American Forum).
An ILAF member organization, LATINgeo (Laboraties for Technology and Information in Geosciences), translated the OGC Reference Model, and other ILAF members have translated a number of OGC standards. A mailing list, ILA.Forum [at] opengeospatial.org, was set up, and it is open to all OGC members and non-members. ILAF maintains an external twiki -- http://external.opengeospatial.org/twiki_public/ILAFpublic/ -- which provides access to Spanish language documents, coordinates activities, and generally serves to lower the barrier to OGC involvement by Spanish speakers. One goal is to expand the website to provide similar support for speakers of Portuguese.
On 17 March 2011, ILAF held a very successful OGC Interoperability Day in Barcelona. OGC vendor and scientific organization members demonstrated how their products and Web services work together with products and services from other vendors, and the talks about the OGC standards process, OGC standards and Sensor Web Enablement were well attended.
Those interested in learning more about ILAF can contact Joan Maso atjoan.maso [at] uab.es ( ) or Joan Capdevila at joan.capdevila [at] mpt.es.
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REPORT ON FEBRUARY/MARCH TC AND PC MEETINGS
By %20lmckee [at] opengeospatial.org (Lance McKee)
Senior Staff Writer (filling in for Carl Reed, Executive Director, Specification Program, CTO while he’s on vacation)
Last month's Technical Committee and Planning Committee meetings in Bonn were hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the voice for the environment in the United Nations system. The meetings were supported by UN-SPIDER (the United Nations Platform for Space-based Information for Disaster Management and Emergency Response), a unit within UNOOSA (the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs). The Bonn meeting had higher attendance than any previous OGC meeting. Technical Committee meeting attendance has been roughly proportional to OGC membership, which has grown each year since 1994. Membership is now at 420 organizations with a phenomenal global reach through the members’ networks as well.
The closing plenary sessions are getting to be all-day affairs – there were 37 Working Group meetings, most of which included multiple reports and discussions of multiple topics (see sidebar). Special meetings were held to report on interoperability initiatives such as the multi-threaded OWS-8 Testbed, aviation information pilot projects and several interoperability experiments. The Europe Forum and various committees met, such as the Architecture Board, the Business Value Committee and the Compliance and Interoperability Testing Initiative (CITE).
Plenary reports from working groups focused on a number of topics such as Emergency and Disaster Management, Earth Systems Science, Geosemantics, Security, Workflow and Defense and Intelligence. Lightweight location standards, location based services (LBS) interoperability and the “mass market” are hot topics and important business issues for many of the members, and this was reflected in more than a dozen presentations and discussions in the CityGML, Mass Market, Sensor Web Enablement and Decision Support domain working groups. After a vote, Open GeoSMS, a candidate standard with particular significance for the mass market, was posted for public review prior to adoption as an official OGC standard.
A slide set containing information on the approved motions and informative announcements will be posted soon, after which it can be downloaded from the portal: http://www.ogcnetwork.net/node/367.
The June 2011 OGC meetings will be held in Taichung, Taiwan. We hope to see you there.
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By darctur [at] opengeospatial.org (David Arctur)
Director, Interoperability Programs
The 3-day Kick-off Workshop for OWS-8 (http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/initiatives/ows-8) sponsors and participants took place at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, 9-11 March 2011. Over the next 6 months, technology provider participants will develop and test interoperability solutions focused on the sponsors’ scenarios and use cases in the areas of observation fusion, geosynchronization, cross-community interoperability and aviation information management and delivery.
The OWS-8 sponsors include:
EUROCONTROL
European Space Agency (ESA)
Lockheed Martin Corporation
U.K. Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL)
U.S. Army Geospatial Center (AGC)
U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)
U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)
Final reports from the participating technology provider companies are due 30 September 2011. These participants will present live demonstrations of OWS-8 results to sponsors and others at the September 2011 OGC Technical Committee meeting in Boulder, Colorado USA.
OGC Interoperability Initiatives include testbeds, pilot projects, interoperability experiments and interoperability support services. Ten other Interoperability Initiatives are currently under way, advancing interoperability in areas such as 3D portrayal, authentication, environmental modelling for the mitigation of health risks, GEOSS (Global Earth Observation System of Systems), groundwater and surface water observation and management, and mobile internet. Some are major projects lasting up to a year. Others are brief, low-budget activities. All are designed to encourage rapid development, testing, validation and adoption of OGC standards.
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WEBSITE OF THE MONTH: PACIFIC DISASTER CENTER (PDC)
“PDC has … included rapid damage assessments that assist analysts conducting further assessments or immediate response activities. The REST service allows users to import data using OGC compliant standards into their own desktop applications or web based platforms while combining with other geospatial data for an enhanced look at the events in Japan.”
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The CityGML development community has made a number of good quality podcasts and videos available to the public. A video recording of Thomas Kolbe and others at a 15 March 2011 TU Delft workshop provides an excellent technical review, and podcasts produced by the Technical University of Berlin provide an introduction to urban modeling, the OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) standard and the OGC CityGML standard.
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OGC welcomes new members who joined us recently.
Atos Origin Integration (Associate) (France)
Bartolomé, Oscar Fonts (Individual) (Spain)
Chair of Geoinformatics, Geohydrology & Modelling, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena (University) (Germany)
Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) (Research Institute / Not For Profit Institute) (United States)
Deutscher Wetterdienst (Associate) (Germany)
EuroGeographics (Research Institute / Not For Profit Institute) (Belgium)
HR Wallingford (Research Institute / Not For Profit Institute) (United Kingdom)
IDS Ingegneria dei Sistemi S.p.A. (Associate) (Italy)
JVI Solutions (Associate) (United States)
Kiehle, Christian (Individual) (Germany)
KIRRA for Mapping & GIS Est (Technical) (Saudi Arabia)
La Trobe University (University) (Australia)
Lantmäteriet (Associate) (Sweden)
Lattice Technology Group, Inc. (Small Company) (United States)
Mercury Project Solutions (Small Company) (Australia)
Ministry of Land, Transport & Maritime Affairs (Technical) (Korea, Republic of)
Munshi, M.K. (Individual) (India)
Pearsall, Richard A. (Individual) (United States)
Perey, Christine (Individual) (Switzerland)
Regionalverband Ruhr (RVR) (GovFuture-Local) (Germany)
Stichting Deltares (former Delft Hydraulics) (Research Institute / Not For Profit Institute) (Netherlands)
TASC (Technical) (United States)
Technische Universität Braunschweig, Institut für Geodäsie & Photogrammetrie (University) (Germany)
the PYXIS innovation inc (Small Company) (Canada)
The SI Organization, Inc. (Technical) (United States)
Thermopylae Sciences & Technology (Associate) (United States)
University of Miami (University) (United States)
Van Linden, Luc (Individual) (Belgium)
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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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Press releases so far in 2011:
OGC and OSCRE Work Together to Advance Real Estate Standards across the Globe
March 31, 2011
GE Energy Invests as Principal Member of the Open Geospatial Consortium
March 30, 2011
OGC Forms International Water Information Standards Working Group
March 28, 2011
OGC Seeks Comments on Open GeoSMS – Candidate Standard for Location in Short Message Service
March 25, 2011
OGC Seeks Comments on Ordering Service Candidate Standard
January 24, 2011
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The following products became Registered OGC-Compliant Products in the last 90 days.
Netgis | Server (4.1.0)
NETCAD [SFS(TF) 1.1, SFS(NG) 1.1, WMS 1.3.0, SFS(BG) 1.1]
O2Map Web (1.0)
Geotwo Co., Ltd [WMS 1.3.0, WFS 1.1.0, WCS 1.0]
Spatial Broker (1.2)
CmWorld [WFS 1.1.0, WMS 1.3.0]
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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.
FOSS4G conference
8 April 2011, Santiago de Chile
The first FOSS4G conference to be held in Chile will take place on April 8th.
The OGC is a sponsor and supporter of this conference.
GI4DM – GeoInformation for Disaster Management
3-8 May Antalya, Turkey
Steven Ramage of the OGC is an invited speaker at the Gi4DM, an ISPRS conference. The OGC has a Memorandum of Understanding with ISPRS.
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 for the first time ever the event will take place in the country's capital, Abu Dhabi.
Bentley BE Together
23-26 May 2011, Philadelphia, PA, USA
Mark Reichardt of the OGC is an invited speaker at this Bentley User Conference.
COM.Geo 2011
23-25 May 2011, Washington, DC, USA
The OGC’s George Percivall and Nadine Alameh will lead a workshop titled “Expanding GeoWeb to an Internet of Things” (http://www.com-geo.org/prog_workshops.htm). This is the 2nd International Conference on Computing for Geospatial Research and Application. George Percivall will also deliver a keynote address at the conference.
XIII Conferencia Iberoamericana de Sistemas de Información Geográfica 25-27 May 2011, Toluca, Mexico
http://facgeografia.uaemex.mx/confibsig/eejes.htm
The OGC’s Luis Bermudez will be speaking.
GI Norden
8-9 June 2011, Turku, Finland
GI Norden 2011 conference is the 23rd annual Nordic GIS Conference. The conference is organised by GI Norden and ProGIS. The OGC’s Steven Ramage will deliver the keynote address on Day 2.
Augmented Reality Workshop at the OGC Technical Committee and Planning Committee Meetings
12-17 June 2011,
The OGC will be hosting the next Augmented Reality Standards workshop at the OGC Technical Committee and Planning Committee Meetings in Taichung, Taiwan.
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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 2011 by the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.
