OGC Newsletter - September 2011
September 2011
CONTENTS
NOTE FROM THE EDITOR - THIS IS OUR LAST NEWSLETTER!THIS MONTH'S MESSAGE: Chris Little on the Meteorology/Oceans and Hydrology Working GroupsREPORT ON JUNE TC AND PC MEETINGSINTEROPERABILITY PROGRAM NEWSWEBSITE OF THE MONTHNEW MEMBERSOGC PRESS COVERAGE, TUTORIALS, VIDEOS, PRESENTATIONS, PAPERS AND BLOGS OGC PRESS RELEASESOGC IN SOCIAL MEDIABITS AND BYTESNEW COMPLIANT PRODUCTSSPECIAL INVITATIONSOTHER UPCOMING EVENTSCONTACTSUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE
Back issues of OGC News are available.
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NOTE FROM THE EDITOR - THIS IS OUR LAST NEWSLETTER!
By lmckee [at] opengeospatial.org (Lance McKee)
This will be our last quarterly OGC Newsletter, because the newsletter format constrains us in our effort to keep our community informed. To do a better of job of 1) getting our news and views out more quickly to more people and 2) getting more people to contribute their news and views, today we are launching The OGC Blog – a blog about spatial communication.
The OGC Blog will include regular contributions by staff as well as frequent posts by members of the broad and continually expanding OGC community, some of whom are NOT OGC members! We will offer newsfeeds and daily or weekly email updates to serve a range of news consumer preferences. All the types of content we've been publishing in the newsletter will be available on the blog, but the news will be more timely and there will be more opportunity for reader commentary, more links to relevant content out on the Web, and more opportunities for OGC members to communicate with each other and the world.
We are excited about the potential, we invite your suggestions and we hope you will enjoy this new and expanded window on the world of the OGC!
THIS MONTH’S MESSAGE
We have usually begun our newsletter with a statement from a member of the OGC's executive staff. This month, however, as a lead-in to the OGC blog that will soon replace this newsletter, we offer our readers the text of my recent interview with Chris Little, International Telecoms & Projects at the UK Met Office. Chris is Co-Chair of the OGC/WMO Meteorology and Oceanography Domain Working Group, along with Co-Chair Marie-Francoise Voidrot of Météo-France. Both the Meteorology and Oceanography Domain Working Group and the Hydrology Domain Working Group are Working Groups of the OGC connected to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) through an agreement that specifies WMO staff participation.
Lance McKee
Editor, OGC Newsletter
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THIS MONTH'S MESSAGE: CHRIS LITTLE ON THE METEOROLOGY/OCEANS AND HYDROLOGY WORKING GROUPS
by Chris Little (CL) and Lance McKee (LM)
LM: Why and when did National Meteorological Services become interested in OGC?
CL: The operational meteorology community in Europe meets every two years to listen to talks and to meet in breakout sessions that sometimes result in recommendations. One was to hold in 2008 an OGC standards workshop with invited speakers and participation by a number of OGC members. This workshop led to the recommendation that National Met Services and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) should form an OGC Domain Working Group. I headed this effort, and the OGC meeting in Athens in 2009 was my first OGC meeting.
Prior to this, in Met Services, we had looked at traditional GIS and then web services, but the computational requirements of meteorology presented obstacles. Only recently have we had enough computing power to make GIS useful with our data. Twenty years ago, even with serious hardware, a GIS took two hours to produce a computer-generated surface pressure map, but it wasn't practical because we needed to produce 100,000 such maps every day! We use GIS now for specific customers, but raw meteorological data is processed mainly in specialized systems. At the same time, however, today we have a much greater need to share data, data products (such as pressure maps and forecasts) and data processing resources, so standards are a key requirement, and thus the OGC is an important partner.
LM: Why did you and your colleagues create one Domain Working Group for Hydrology and another Domain Working Group for Meteorology and Oceanography?
CL: In the world of meteorology, we have had 150 years of international data sharing. Sharing has been the norm for 60 years, since UN members started exchanging data on an hourly basis, 24 hours a day, after World War II. Hydrologists, on the other hand, are more nationally oriented. Water information, in fact, has often been protected for national security reasons, so interoperability of hydrology data and services at the international level has been quite limited. Only now, as the world gets smaller and as water resources and weather crises are being managed across borders, is there more pressure for interoperability. Hydrologists have tended to do one-off projects and isolated programs, and their focus has been on observations rather than data products such as forecasts. Hydrologists are keen on the OGC Observations and Measurements standard, whereas meteorologists are more interested in the OGC Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Coverage Service (WCS) standards.
It is also the case that meteorologists and oceanographers have a long tradition of working together. Oceanographers are coordinated through UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and IOC (Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission) with their own international meetings and international standards, but also coordinated jointly with WMO. So it made sense to have a joint OGC Meteorology and Oceanography Domain Working Group.
LM: How have your views on OGC altered in the last two years?
CL: When the UK Met Office first joined the OGC, our target was a best practice document for the OGC Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS) Interface standards. After the first year, we started paying more attention to the OGC Observations and Measurements (O&M) standard. A lot of the OGC's work has obviously gone into the Sensor Web Enablement standards, and it makes sense to tap into this. Meteorologists and oceanographers have their own interoperability standards, but they weren't really paying attention to technology trends in OGC. So we now have a desire to do outreach to the Met Oceans observation community. The standards potentially enable us to do more with the data, but they also enable us to get more and hopefully better data.
Also, there is a lot of other activity in the OGC that is potentially interesting to meteorology. The 3D, urban modelling, and mass-market developments are relevant to our vision of where things are going. Until recently we could have ignored all of this. Now this is all moving out of the realm of futuristic visions and into the realm of reality. Mobile phones, augmented reality, games, Xbox, Microsoft Kinect – all these technologies have a lot of money behind them and they are becoming pervasive. They are all geospatial, offering lots of new ways of interacting with spatial data, and all driving the need for interoperability. A few years ago I went into Second Life virtual reality and found that the US National Weather Service had set up shop. But there was no interoperability with other virtual reality systems. We now see interoperability as a business driver. The GPS in your car is augmented reality and 3D. We won't do meteorology on this scale but there will be requirements for weather feeds for those environments. It's Moore's law. 10-15 years ago, only the military could afford systems like this for fighter pilots, now it's for foot soldiers in the infantry. There will be opportunities as these technologies continue to unfold. As processor speeds increase, we are able to provide finer grained, more local weather forecasts, though there are obviously some constraints. On a global scale, numerical models are at 20 km. Local models can be run, down to 10 km or even 1 km. In the next 5 to 10 years, we expect to start being able to predict for urban canyons and other human scale environments, assuming we will have learned more by then about the physics at these scales and can ‘downscale’ the information properly.
LM: Do you see any changes in OGC in the last two years?
CL: I see that the OGC has responded to the way we wanted to do things. 189 countries have National Met Services, but there are only a few Met services that have enough money and interested individuals to join the OGC. So we wanted an open wiki and open listserv to serve the large non-member community we are part of, and the OGC was flexible enough to accommodate us. We have seen the OGC become more open and more global, and I think we've contributed to that, because we always had a global perspective. From our perspective, it's good that the OGC rotates its meetings between hemispheres, and it was heartening to learn that European members now outnumber North American members. At the recent meetings in Taiwan there were fewer people from the west but many from China, India, Japan, Korea, and Singapore. I think that's very promising.
At the technology level, when I came in there was the old guard – geographers and geospatial specialists who saw the world essentially as 2D with elevation. Now there are more new people from scientific visualization or environmental science backgrounds. For them, all data is a hypercube of which some slices correspond to a map. Met Oceans and climate involve these much bigger and more demanding conceptual data models. What's interesting about the OGC is that most of these people are not meteorologists; they are people from other communities with their own hypercubes to slice and dice. Meteorology is thus just one use case. It is heartening to see that the OGC and the Met Ocean community are headed in some of the same directions.
LM: What are the current activities of the Met Ocean DWG?
CL: We've just had an informal interoperability experiment, a small plugfest in Toulouse four weeks ago, which was not an official OGC Interoperability Experiment. Also, we have started a Web Map Service best practice document, which may turn into a WMS profile. That's the major activity. We also want to make a lot of Met and aviation symbologies and styles available so the Style Layer Descriptor and Symbology Encoding standards and others can be made more useful, so we're developing definitive symbols. This is going a bit slowly, because it depends on volunteers.
LM: What's your vision for the future of the geosciences?
CL: As we just discussed, it will be interesting to see how the new technologies will be applied in the Met Oceans domains. We are at interesting point, a step change in scale and accuracy. We are coming down to 1 km numerical models, which allow the simulation of individual thunderstorms, rather than an averaged area of thunderstorms, and the models will get finer in the next 15 years. What's interesting is that as we increase computational power we know exactly how much more accuracy we can get. The more steps you have, the more precision. That doesn't, by the way, address the chaos aspect, the notion that a butterfly flapping its wings in China could cause a hurricane in some other region. That's addressed in meteorology by running ensembles of, say, 50 different forecasts in parallel. All are valid, and if they don't diverge, you have confidence in the result. If they do diverge, you have uncertainty. It's called ensemble forecasting. We can issue a confidence figure. We're just making the hypercube conceptual model more complicated. It is as if we have a new dimension of equally valid geographies. It is like the change in perception brought about by Mandelbrot, and before him, Lewis Fry Richardson, and their observations about fractals.
Climatology and meteorology are converging. In the past when we were trying to produce forecasts for climate, we just ran the numerical models for longer. If the models blew up and become non-meteorological, we knew we were wrong. The numerical weather prediction models now keep looking meteorological as they are run out for more years, which gives confidence in them. Now if you want to do a climate simulation you can do a 100 year simulation or longer. In the history of forecasting, a forecaster could first do it within a limited area for a 1 or 2 day forecast. Beyond a day or two you need to consider the whole hemisphere, north or south. Beyond 3 days you need to take into account both hemispheres. By twenty years ago, leading numerical models were global, but one could ignore changing sea ice or sea temperature. Now we adjust for sea surface temperature daily, and we calculate for interactive air/ocean heat transfer. The simplest models ignored rain, but now we factor in ice, liquid water, water vapor, and even the different heat transfer physics of the different kinds of ice and frost.
We know how to soak up future increases in computing power, whether at the individual chip level or with massively parallel super computers, by finer simulations, better and more detailed physics, more observations, a greater range of scales of interactions and extended timescales, though money and availability of electrical power are strong constraints. OGC standards, in addition to helping with data sharing and technology convergence as described above, help us save money and time through the familiar advantages of service oriented architectures, which enables us to allocate more resources to achieving these goals.
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REPORT ON JUNE TC AND PC MEETINGS
The June 2011 Technical Committee and Planning Committee meetings in Taiwan were hosted by the GIS.FCU Research Center, Feng Chia University and the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). Additional Sponsors included: Meet Taiwan, Bureau of Foreign Trade, Intergraph, National Applied Research Laboratories, National Science Council and the National Center for High Performance Computing.
OGC staff thanks all who participated in the various meetings and workshops, and we are especially grateful to the meeting hosts and sponsors, who provided the OGC with a very successful and memorable meeting, our first in Asia.
A slide set containing information on the approved motions and informative announcements has been posted on the OGC Network web page for Document motions from OGC meetings. Our hosts have provided more meeting details and photos.
The September 2011 OGC meetings will be held in Boulder, Colorado, USA, September 19-23. We hope to see you there.
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"Shibboleth Federations and Secure SDI: Outcome and Demonstrations from the OGC Web Service Shibboleth Interoperability Experiment": This was presented at the INSPIRE Conference 2011. Shibboleth is an open source implementation of the OASIS standard Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) used by millions of IT practitioners around the globe. Through the recent European Spatial Data Infrastructure Network (ESDIN) project and the OGC Web Service (OWS) Shibboleth Interoperability Experiment, it has been demonstrated that Shibboleth Access Management Federations provide a production strength, standards-based, open source, interoperable solution to the problem of how to implement access control around the OGC web services central to Spatial Data Infrastructures.
The OWS-8 testbed activity concludes this month, and ive demonstrations of OWS-8 results will be conducted at the September 2011 OGC Technical Committee meeting in Boulder, Colorado USA.
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) is in the process of planning its next OGC Web Services initiative, OWS-9. New proposals from public sector and private sector sponsors are welcomed. If your organization is interested in this initiative, please contact Nadine Alameh (nalameh [at] opengeospatial [dot] org) or George Percival (gpercivall [at] opengeospatial [dot] org).
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OGC members STFC and NERC use OGC standards in the Science Visualisation Service, International Space Innovation Centre
The Science Visualisation Service for Earth Observation (SVSeo) has been developed as a web based application to allow users in the new International Space Innovation Centre (ISIC) and the wider community to visualise and make use of Earth Observation data and climate model simulations. The application implements the OGC Web Map Service (WMS) Interface Standard to display datasets as maps in the visualisation client.
Users can visually explore large and complex environmental datasets from observations and models, view, step through and zoom in to gridded datasets on a map view, export images as figures and create animations. Different views can be easily overlaid, e.g. different parameters in the same data, or different datasets. The images and animations can be exported for viewing and manipulation on the ISIC videowall, on Google Earth or other viewing software.
The SVSeo displays datasets that are made available through the CEDA (Centre for Environmental Data Archival archives through the CEDA OGC Web Services framework but can include any remote data which are exposed via a WMS interface. The COWS server uses the GML application schema Climate Science Modelling Language to describe the underlying datasets which are in netCDF data format compliant with CF (Climate and Forecasting) conventions.
The SVSeo website is available for use and can also be used at the ISIC facility in conjunction with a large videowall to create WMS-based animations on a virtual globe. Users can also load multiple images simultaneously on synchronised virtual globes.
The International Space Innovation Centre (ISIC) is being established on the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus. It will create a critical mass of space-related activities by linking existing distributed pockets of expertise in UK industry, academia and Government. This is being done in a setting that provides a unique concentration of facilities to support research, collaboration, operations and business growth promoting self-sustainability.
For further information on the visualisation software or ISIC visualisation facilities please contact OGC members: Dominic Lowe (dominic.lowe [at] stfc.ac.uk) or Jon Blower (j.d.blower [at] reading.ac.uk).
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OGC welcomes new members who joined since 4 April 2011:
ADASA Sistemas (Associate) (Spain)
Capgemini (Associate) (France)
CNR Institute for Atmospheric Pollution Research (University) (Italy)
Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) (University) (United States)
Couchbase, Inc. (Small Company) (United States)
CTI Engineering Co., Ltd. (Associate) (Japan)
Custer, Adrian (Individual) (France)
Deloitte Financial Advisory Services, LLP (Technical) (United States)
Development Seed (Associate) (United States)
Geographic Planning Collaborative Global Information Solutions (GPC GIS) (Associate) (United Arab Emirates)
Ghent University (University) (Belgium)
GIS Center for Security (Principal) (United Arab Emirates)
Hawaiian Airlines (Associate) (United States)
HYUNDAI MNSOFT, Inc. (Associate) (Korea, Republic of)
Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology - Delhi (University) (India)
MINES ParisTech (University) (France)
National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Research Institute / Not For Profit Institute) (New Zealand)
National Meteorological Administration (Associate) (Romania)
Oakar Services Ltd. (Small Company) (Kenya)
Pearsall, Richard A. (Individual) (United States)
Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD) (Research Institute / Not For Profit Institute) (Kenya)
Saab AB (Associate) (Sweden)
Space Applications Services S.A./N.V. (Associate) (Belgium)
Sparx Systems (Associate) (Australia)
Spatialytics (Spatialytics Solution inc.) (Small Company) (Canada)
Starling, Robert (Individual) (Australia)
Taiwan Geographic Information System Center (Research Institute / Not For Profit Institute) (Chinese Taipei)
terrestris GmbH & Co. KG (Small Company) (Germany)
The HDF Group (Research Institute / Not For Profit Institute) (United States)
UNIGIS International Association (UIA) (Research Institute / Not For Profit Institute) (Netherlands)
Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, UPC (SARTI research group) (University) (Spain)
University of California, Santa Barbara (NCEAS) (University) (United States)
University of Colorado (University) (United States)
Wikitude GmbH. (Small Company) (Austria)
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (University) (United States)
World Bank Institute (Research Institute / Not For Profit Institute) (United States)
You, Jinsoo (Individual) (Korea, Republic of)
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OGC PRESS COVERAGE, TUTORIALS, VIDEOS, PRESENTATIONS, PAPERS AND BLOGS
See the OGC Press Coverage page for a chronological listing of articles, blog entries and papers about OGC and OGC standards.
See also the growing collection of OGC tutorials and other educational resources.
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Press releases since the last newsletter:
The OGC Forms International Augmented Reality Standards Working Group
September 14, 2011
The OGC and CEN/TC 287 announce Smart Grid location interoperability workshop
September 9, 2011
The OGC and OpenMI Association to advance computer modelling standards
August 25, 2011
The OGC Seeks Participants for Hydrologic Forecasting Interoperability Experiment
August 24, 2011
The OGC seeks comment on City Geography Markup Language (CityGML) V1.1
August 15, 2011
OGC completes Water Information Concept Development Study
August 1, 2011
The OGC Announces GEOSS Workshop XLIII: Sharing Climate Information and Knowledge
July 29, 2011
The OGC Announces GML 4.0 (Geography Markup Language) Workshop
July 27, 2011
The OGC Announces 3D Summit
July 26, 2011
The OGC Announces Oceans/Meteorology/Hydrology Water Cycle Summit
July 25, 2011
OGC Requests Sensor Planning Server (SPS) 2.0 Reference Implementations
July 22, 2011
OGC seeks comment on candidate Earth observation profile of coverage standard
July 21, 2011
OGC Seeks Comment on candidate GeoSPARQL standard
July 6, 2011
OGC Seeks Comment on Geography Markup Language 3.3 Standard
July 5, 2011
OGC completes airspace information sharing pilot
June 30, 2011
The OGC elects Jacqueline McGlade to board of directors
June 27, 2011
OGC workshops at the INSPIRE Conference 2011
June 24, 2011
OGC workshops at the INSPIRE Conference 2011
June 24, 2011
The OGC elects Sanjay Kumar to board of directors
June 23, 2011
OGC seeks comment on PUCK standard for sensors and transducers
June 23, 2011
The OGC Appoints Industry Leaders to Board of Directors
June 20, 2011
OGC Seeks Comment on Earth Observation Metadata profile of Observations & Measurements Standard
June 13, 2011
OGC Meetings and International Augmented Reality Standards Meeting to be held 12-17 June 2011 in Taiwan
June 7, 2011
OGC Requests Web Map Tile Service (WMTS) Reference Implementations
June 2, 2011
OGC Reduces Membership Fees for Developing Nations
May 18, 2011
OGC GovFuture Webinar Invitation
May 17, 2011
OGC Technical Meetings and International Augmented Reality Standards Meeting to be held June 2011 in Taiwan
April 28, 2011
OGC Announces XML Encoding Standard for Observations and Measurements
April 27, 2011
OGC Releases Java(R) Interface Standard for Geospatial Software
April 26, 2011
OGC Announces “SWE Common” Standards to Simplify Sensor Web Development
April 25, 2011
The OGC Seeks Participants for 3D Portrayal Interoperability Experiment
April 22, 2011
OGC Web Feature Service Standard accepted as ISO Standard
April 20, 2011
OGC announces netCDF Standard for Communicating Multidimensional Data
April 19, 2011
OGC announces Indoor Navigation Discussion Paper
April 11, 2011
GEO Announces Call for Participation in GEOSS Pilot with OGC Leadership
April 7, 2011
OGC Announces International Earth Observation Satellite Tasking Standard
April 5, 2011
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- 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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Fast access with OGC Web Map Service (WMS) Interface Standard: From a paper, "Using spatial principles to optimize distributed computing for enabling the physical science discoveries," by C. Yang et al, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS):
"Our portal experiment found that 200 WMS capability files can be accessed within 1 second. Therefore, we can discover and utilize datasets for scientific studies on the fly instead of waiting for days to months to get the datasets and determine if the datasets obtained are usable or not. This performance improvement contributes to a 21st century paradigm shift in data access—from media shipping to on the fly, online access."
A special issue on spatial cyberinfrastructure is now available in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). This special issue was organized and edited by Dawn Wright, with external peer review overseen by National Academy of Sciences member M. Goodchild. Spatial cyberinfrastructure is also the focus of the recent US National Science Foundation (NSF) announcement that NSF is seeking transformative concepts and approaches to create integrated data management infrastructures across the Geosciences. The goal is to create a prototype Earth Cube system for an agile and robust geosciences-integrating architecture with an inclusive governance paradigm. OGC members are developing a set of white papers relevant to Earth Cube. We invite you to participate!
Dutch 3D pilot: The OGC CityGML Encoding Standard is now the standard for 3D geo-information in the Netherlands. Geonovum, the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) executive committee in the Netherlands, has provided this report on the Dutch 3D Pilot NL phase 1, which completed in June 2011. Comprehensive 3D models are being built or considered by many countries. This report explains why the Netherlands has invested in this infrastructure and why they chose to base their model on CityGML, an international open standard.
BRISEIDE: OGC Web Services (OWS) for emergency response in Europe: Briseide is a EU project focusing on OGC Web Services for emergency management and response. It uses the OGC Web Map Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS), Web Coverage Service (WCS), Web Processing Service (WPS) and Sensor Observation Service (SOS) Interface standards and others.
OneGeology cookbooks: OneGeology partners have created some really good cookbooks to convey the basics of OGC Web Services for mapping production and management. Our thanks go to Ian Jackson, freshly retired director of the British Geologic Survey, for letting us know about these. Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) of the New Zealand GeoSpatial Office released their Spatial Data InfraStructure Cookbook V.1 on 5 July 2011.
OGC data encodings are here to stay. WeoGeo now supports KML and GML output of all vector formats in their Market and Library. Users can easily convert shapefiles and TAB files to KML/GML.
G.O. LOC saves lives: Daniel Morissette has written about a system based on OGC standards that helped save a family that was in a plane crash in Quebec. The 9-1-1 call center used a recently deployed system, G.O. LOC (Gestion des Opérations de Localisation et de Cartographie), to locate the crash and deploy a rescue unit. The quick response saved lives. G.O. LOC implements the OGC Web Map Service (WMS) Standard to integrate layers of data from multiple sources. The Province of Quebec Ministry of Public Safety had asked for OGC Standards, and MapGears facilitated the development and deployment of the system for the Ministry. Watch for the article by Daniel in an upcoming issue of Directions Magazine.
Congratulations to Stefan R. Falke, who has received the Falkenberg Award: Stefan Falk, who has been active in the OGC Earth Observation and Natural Resources Domain Working Group, the GEOSS AIP (Architecture Implementation Pilot) Air Quality Workgroup and other OGC activities, received last December the American Geophysical Union (AGU) 2010 Charles S. Falkenberg Award. The award honors a "scientist under 45 years of age who has contributed to the quality of life, economic opportunities, and stewardship of the planet through the use of Earth science information and to the public awareness of the importance of understanding our planet." In his response to the citation in Eos (12 April 2011), Stefan wrote, "While at EPA, I was introduced to the Open Geospatial Consortium and its standards, which have become foundational for advancing interoperability."
OGC standards endorsed by FGDC: OGC standards have been endorsed by the FGDC as part of the External Standards Endorsement process.
Geotagged pictures and photo WMS: At GI4DM in Turkey Joan Masó from CREAF presented on geotagged pictures and photo WMS.
EMSC Earthquake Data Portal: The European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) has developed a new web service to access their event catalog. This new service implements the OGC WMS and WFS standards, allowing the event catalog to be easily integrated within GIS and other geospatial applications. The use of these standards lets users mix different layers (such as geological maps, etc.) using existing software, and gives the opportunity to aggregate information from different sources and areas. A demo of different technologies using their new services is available. The EMSC is planning to make all of its data, including the event catalog, ShakeMaps, station metadata, submitted pictures, macro-seismic questionnaires, and other products, available through these standard web services during the National EMSC Resource Alliance (ERA) project.
WMS is a Canada Standard: GeoConnections has worked with the Canada Treasury Board to establish some of the core CGDI standards as Government of Canada standards. The initial standards that are now government of Canada standards are the ISO 19115 metadata standard and ISO 19128 WMS. (This also allows for implementation of non-ISO versions of WMS.) It is expected that additional geo-standards will be added in the future.
Service Model Translator (SMT): If you want to create LinkedData out of the requested service data, you need an ontology that describes the requested features. Such a simple feature model has been developed. The SMT translates service metadata from different OGC Web Services into WSDL and LinkedData.
US Bureau of Census validates OGC Geosynchronization: "GSS Initiative Digital Exchange ACCEPTED" document says that Geosynchronization is ideal for Census requirements (p. 61). Read about the OGC Geosynchronization 1.0 Standards Working Group.
MapAction, a disaster mapping NGO, urged national mapping agencies to work towards discoverability and readiness of spatial data for sudden onset disasters, at the Cambridge Conference on 29 June. The conference was hosted by Ordnance Survey Great Britain. MapAction described its work in Nepal, the Caribbean and southern Africa to foster data preparedness as a crucial measure for rapid aid response. The charity has also been in the field in three humanitarian crises so far this year: for the Libya conflict, the Japan earthquake and tsunami, and the displacement of 750,000 people in the Ivory Coast.
OGC and GPC GIS Partner for Interoperability in the MENA Region: GPC Global Information Solutions (GPC GIS) has joined the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to help drive open standards in the Mid-East North Africa (MENA) region. GPC GIS will work closely with the OGC to increase the awareness of open geospatial standards, promote the benefits of these standards, and support greater implementation of OGC standards
The South Esk Hydrological Sensor Web: Next-Generation Catchment Management was a National Award Winner in Australia's 2011 iAwards, "Honouring the ICT industry's finest". The award category was "Sustainability and Green IT." The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) nominated this project, which involves OGC Sensor Web Enablement standards in watershed monitoring.
WMS catalog at mapmatters.org: "You will find an extensive catalogue of OGC web map services (WMS) here. For all services and WMS layers we offer an optional monitoring that allows to judge not only the contents but also the quality of the service with respect to availability and performance."
An earthquake early warning for railways uses OGC standards.
Alaska Mapped uses OGC WMS, WFS and WCS standards.
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The following products became Registered OGC-Compliant Products since the last newsletter.
Autodesk® Infrastructure Map Server (2012)
Autodesk, Inc.
WMS 1.3.0, WFS 1.1.0
Cadcorp GeognoSIS (7.0)
Cadcorp
WMS (rp) 1.3.0, WFS 1.0.0
Enterprise IAS (2.1)
ITT Visual Information Solutions
WCS 1.0.0
GeoMedia SDI Pro (6.1)
Intergraph
WFS 1.1.0, WMS 1.3.0, WMS 1.1.1
GEOMEX-Web (3.0)
GEOMEX SOFT Co., Ltd.
WFS 1.1.0, WMS 1.3.0
Osiris (R4)
GIS Consult GmbH
WMS 1.1.1
Rolta Geomatica WebServer Suite (10.3)
Rolta India Ltd.
WFS(T) 1.0.0, WFS 1.0.0, WMS 1.3.0, WCS 1.1.1, WMS 1.1.1
SuperGIS Server (3.01)
SuperGeo Technologies Inc.
WFS 1.0.0, WCS 1.0.0, WMS 1.3.0
VISION MapServer (1.0)
Computer Vision Laboratories (India) Pvt. Ltd. (VISIONLABS)
WMS 1.3.0
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Two award programs are worth noting:
2011-2012 GSDI Small Grants Program: Apply for a grant to support national or sub-national activities that foster partnerships, develop in-country technical capacity, improve data compatibility and access, and increase political support for spatial data infrastructure and earth observations application development. The Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association is pleased to announce its Small Grants Program for the year 2011-12. Application deadline is 31 October 2011.
EUROGI/eSDI-Net sub-national SDIs Best Practices Awards 2011: SDI Self-Assessment Framework. EUROGI invites all type of stakeholders in charge of sub-national SDIs, at any level (regional, local), of any size and from any region of Europe, to participate in the EUROGI/eSDI-Net sub-national SDIs Best Practices Awards 2011. For details see: SDI Self-Assessment Framework 2011.
Also, the organizers of the following events have invited OGC staff to participate as speakers and panelists, and we invite you to attend.
The Earth’s Environment, Observations and Benefits (webinar), 21 September 2011, 14:00-14:00 UTC. This EuroGEOSS Web Seminar on “The Earth’s Environment, Observations and Benefits” is on societal benefit assessment for GEOSS. Register for the Web seminar at: https://cc.readytalk.com/r/i0k97k0x75g7.
Smart Korea 2011: There will be a 2011 OGC Interoperability Day in Seoul organized by the OGC Korea Forum in conjunction with the NSDI Division, MLTM. There will be two sessions: SDI & OGC and Technologies/Markets and OGC, with 4 presentations per session. This workshop will also announce the OGC TC/PC meetings in Fall 2012. It is supported by the Korean Agency for Technology and Standards (KATS) - national standards body. The event will take place on Thursday October 27th in conjunction with Smart Korea 2011 (formerly known as NSDI KOREA). UN-GGIM will be held at the same time elsewhere in Seoul, so GGIM participants have been invited to the SMART KOREA conference for 27th October. If you are interested in the seminar, please contact Dr. Kang Hae-Kyong (hkkang [at] krihs.re.kr)
Geospatial Defence and Intelligence APAC – GDI APAC, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
28 - 29 September 2011. Carl Reed, the OGC's CTO and Executive Director of the Standards Program, will speak about "Democratising Standards: Moving Towards Interoperability," and will address these topics:
- Assessing the status of interoperability in the field of geographic information
- Supporting interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT
- Why do we need open standards? Discussing the move towards enterprise GIS
Counter Terror Arabia, United Arab Emirates, 31 October – 2 November 2011.
Steven Ramage, the OGC's Executive Director Marketing & Communications, will speak on "Utilising geospatial information to support multi-agency operations and disaster response."
Smart Grid and Spatial Data Infrastructure; interoperability challenges now and in the future . Ispra, Italy, 5-7 October 2011. CEN/TC 287 Geographic information, in collaboration with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) will host a workshop, a part of the Enviroinfo Conference week. This workshop is sponsored by Sparx Systems. Every smart grid device and phenomenon has a location, and thus communicating location information is a critical smart grid requirement.
LocNav USA 2011, October 18-19, 2011, San Jose, California. This conference incorporates the Location Business Summit, Beyond Navigation, Workshops & The Get Funded Show. Raj Singh, Director of Interoperability Programs, OGC will speak about "OGC Standards Web-enable Location and Sensor Applications".
spatial@gov 2011, 15-17 November 2011, Canberra, Australia. Steven Ramage, the OGC's Executive Director Marketing & Communications, will speak.
DGI2012 Defence Geospatial Intelligence, 23 - 26 January 2012, QEII Conference Centre, Westminster, London, Steven Ramage, the OGC's Executive Director Marketing & Communications, will speak.
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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.
