OGC Requests

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) seeks public comment on version 1.3 of the OGC Indexed 3d Scene Layer (I3S) and Scene Layer Package Format Community Standard. Version 1.3 adds support for Building Scene Layers. Building Scene Layers are derived from Building Information Models (BIM) and/or other 3D building data. 

I3S is designed to enable the streaming and storage of arbitrarily large amounts of 3D geographic data. An I3S dataset, referred to as a Scene Layer, can consist of millions of discrete 3D objects with attributes, integrated surface meshes, symbolized points, or point cloud data covering small to extensive geographic areas. Designed for performance and scalability, a scene layer enables the efficient encoding and transmission of 3D geospatial content for an interactive visualization experience on web browsers, mobile, and desktop apps for both offline and online access. 

I3S is web and cloud friendly and is rooted in modern standards and technological advancements in the areas of 3D graphics, data structuring, and mesh and texture compression.

Version 1.3 of the OGC I3S Community Standard adds support for Building Scene Layers (BSL). A Building Scene Layer is a 3D representation of a building model. A building model may be derived from 3D construction content, such as BIM data, or from a relational database model that contains 3D spatial information. The I3S BSL capability is designed to model the organization of construction data by grouping content into standard engineering disciplines. Content in a BSL may represent a partial building, an individual building, or multiple buildings on a campus.

An I3S Building Scene Layer also encapsulates the semantic structure of the information in the building model while capturing geometry and attributes that can be used in an application. A BSL captures standard Architectural Engineering and Construction (AEC) disciplines such as Mechanical, Architectural, Piping, Electrical, and Structural. Within each discipline, a BSL groups category layers containing 3D objects representing assets of the building such as doors, windows, pipes and walls. The assets can contain attributes that directly reflect standard and user defined metadata that are stored in the source BIM content or other 3D data source.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) seeks public comment on the draft updated charter for the OGC SensorThings API Standards Working Group (SWG). The update adds a new task for the SWG – to create a new SensorThings API - Plus Extension (STAplus) based on the upcoming 21-068 OGC Best Practice for using Sensor Things API with Citizen Science.

The motivation for the Citizen-Science-focused STAplus extension was born during the EC H2020 project, Cos4Cloud. Whereas the dominant use of the OGC SensorThings data model (and API) can be coined with the use-case “single authority provides sensor readings to consumers,” in Citizen Science there are many contributors (the citizens) that together create the “big picture” with their observations.

The introduced STAplus extension supports a model where the observations are owned by (different) users that may each express the license for re-use; this part of the contribution is called the “ownership concept.” In addition to the ownership and license abilities, the introduced extension allows the expression of explicit relations between observations and the creation of group(s) of observations to containerize observations that belong together. Relations can be created among any individual observations or observations of a group to support performant Linked Data extraction and semantic queries, e.g. expressed in SPARQL.

The SensorThings API SWG believes that the introduced extension is an important contribution to the realization of the FAIR principles perhaps not only in Citizen Science as STAplus strengthens the “I” (Interoperability) through a common data model and API as well as the “R” (Re-usability) by enabling standards-based queries that can consider licensing conditions relevant for the reuse of other users’ observations. The STAplus Data Model and Business Logic also enriches existing deployments as the extension can be seamlessly added and thereby offer new capabilities to create and manage the “big picture” with multi-user capabilities.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) seeks public comment on an updated version (v1.1) of the CityJSON Community Standard. The proposed update contains significant improvements over v1.0, including support for the OGC CityGML data model version 3.0 and support for handling large CityJSON files through streaming. 

CityJSON defines ways to describe, in a JSON encoding, most of the common 3D features and objects found in cities (such as buildings, roads, rivers, bridges, vegetation, and city furniture) and the relationships between them. It also defines how to encode different standard levels of detail (LoDs) for the 3D objects in JSON, which allows users to represent different resolutions of objects for different applications and purposes. A list of applications and use-cases for CityJSON is available on the CityJSON website.

The aim of CityJSON is to offer an alternative to the GML encoding of CityGML, which can be verbose and therefore complex to work with. CityJSON aims at being easy-to-use, both for reading datasets, and for creating them. It was designed with programmers in mind, so that tools and APIs supporting it can be quickly built. It was also designed to be compact, typically compressing publicly available CityGML files by 6x.

A CityJSON file describes both the geometry and the semantics of the city features of a given area. A CityJSON object, representing a city, is as ‘flat’ as possible, i.e., the hierarchy of CityGML has been flattened out and only the city objects which are ‘leaves’ of this hierarchy are implemented. This considerably simplifies the storage of a city model, and furthermore does not mean that information is lost.

CityJSON v1.0 was accepted as an OGC Community standard in August 2021. CityJSON version 1.0 is a JSON-based encoding for a subset of the OGC CityGML data model version 2.0.0.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) seeks public comment on the draft charter of the proposed OGC Geo for Open Metaverse Domain Working Group (Metaverse DWG). 

The Metaverse is perhaps the ultimate distributed digital twin of the world. It has the potential to represent everything in the world alongside imagined spaces. The challenges to Standards Development Organizations (SDOs), technologists, artists, and society are huge, but the payoff is believed to be equally tremendous. The Metaverse is not a single thing but, like the internet, is a collection of platforms and technologies: a world of objects that can be navigated and interacted with.

Everything OGC does can be applied to the Metaverse. Our community can contribute expertise in 3D, Modeling & Simulation, Artificial Intelligence, streaming, Augmented and Virtual Realities, routing, mapping, and more – all at scale.

The OGC Metaverse DWG will work on pieces of the Metaverse that pertain to geospatial applications and Standards by developing Open Standards based on FAIR data principles (making data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). Given that the Metaverse will be an evolutionary development, the working group will identify both near- and long-term goals that will help ensure interoperability, FAIRness, and openness. Much of the Metaverse is already happening, so collaboration will be key to its success and will be a grounding principle of this OGC Domain Working Group.

3D geospatially anchored data is powering a revolution across a range of industries. This same data – currently relied upon for construction of the real world – is now driving the creation of virtual/digital worlds that will form parts of the Metaverse.

For the Metaverse to succeed, however, all digital and physical world information will have to work in concert at scale. We have a collective responsibility to ensure that the shared future is FAIR and Open. OGC has always focused on interoperability and open Standards – both of which are key to ensuring an open Metaverse. Working together, we can have a positive impact on this future.

For a primer on the Metaverse and the role that OGC and the Geospatial Industry can play, see the blog post ‘The Metaverse is Geospatial’ on ogc.org.