OGC Requests

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is seeking public comment on the new OGC Moving Features Encoding Extension - JSON candidate standard. Comments are due 21 November, 2019.

This candidate standard defines how to encode and share the various movements of geographic features by using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). Such a ‘moving feature’ is one whose location changes over time. For example, a car, a pedestrian, an airplane, a ship, etc.

OGC Moving Features Encoding Extension - JSON provides an IETF GeoJSON encoding for OGC Moving Features as an alternative to XML Core or Simple CSV. A moving feature contains a temporal geometry, whose location continuously changes over time, as well as dynamic non-spatial attributes whose values vary with time. The JSON Encoding Extension supports, 0- (point trajectories), 1- (lines), 2- (polygons), and 3-dimensional (polyhedrons) objects with locations and/or properties that vary over time.
The ability to attribute time-varying properties to an object (rather than just varying its location or trajectory), has utility and value in many current application areas, including: Location Based Services, Intelligent Transportation Systems, Disaster Risk Management Systems, and Smart City Applications. For example, the traffic congestion on roads and ‘hotspots’ of air pollution are typical moving features seen in the real world.

The representation of the following phenomena in a spatiotemporal domain is within the scope of this Encoding Standard:

• Discrete phenomena, which exist only on a set of instants, such as road accidents;
• Step phenomena, where the changes of locations are abrupt at an instant, such as administrative boundaries;
• Continuous phenomena, whose locations move continuously for a period in time, such as vehicles, typhoons, or floods.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) seeks public comment on new work tasks added to the charter of the Discrete Global Grid Systems (DGGS) Standards Working Group (SWG).

The original goal of the DGGS SWG was to deliver an implementation standard. However, the fundamental and cross-cutting nature of DGGS resulted in the OGC DGGS being published as an OGC Abstract Specification that defines a conceptual model. In recognition of the nature of the relationship between DGGS and other OGC standards, much of the originally forecast effort to draft specific DGGS encoding standards can instead be accommodated by a mixture of extensions, changes, or best practice guides to/for existing OGC Standards. The DGGS SWG is therefore working with relevant OGC Working Groups as necessary to embed linkages between DGGS and other standards in the OGC Standards baseline. The new tasks proposed for the DGGS SWG address these linkages.

The goal of DGGS is to enable rapid assembly of spatial data without the difficulties of working with projected coordinate reference systems. DGGSs represent the Earth as hierarchical sequences of equal area tessellations, each with global coverage and with progressively finer spatial resolution. Individual observations can be assigned to a cell corresponding to both the position and size of the phenomenon being observed - meaning that the resolution and precision of the data capture is inherently part of the stored data, and not something that needs to be explained in metadata - and potentially overlooked.

Further, DGGS come with a standard set of functional algorithms that enable rapid data analysis of very large numbers of cells and, by their very nature, are well suited to parallel processing applications at multiple spatial resolutions - a boon for big data processing

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) requests public comment on the recharter of the OGC Observations and Measurements (O&M) Standards Working Group (SWG).

OGC members have proposed a revision of the SWG Charter to reflect the group’s modified scope of work: to update the existing O&M standards to conform to modern web architecture requirements and best practice, and create a new OGC standard for JSON encoding of O&M data.

The O&M standard was originally defined within the OGC Sensor Web Enablement Initiative in 2003-2007. Version 2.0 of the standard was co-published as the OGC Abstract Specification Topic 20 and ISO 19156:2011. The latest version of OGC Abstract Specification Topic 20 is from 2013. As such, the standard requires revising to accommodate technical issues discovered in various standard implementations and harmonization with recent W3C/OGC standardization work on sensor network terminology and concepts defined in the Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) and Sensor, Observation, Sample, and Actuator (SOSA) ontologies. The ISO 19156 revision will be carried out by the ISO/TC 211 in parallel, and in close co-operation with the O&M SWG revision work on the OGC O&M encoding Standards.

Standards-based exchange of observed, measured, or modeled data are key enablers for many critical online consumer and governmental services. Examples of these data sets include: weather, air quality, and other kinds of environmental observations and forecasts; traffic monitoring data; health monitoring; building and construction safety measurements; various remote sensing data; and industrial process monitoring. The Observations and Measurements family of Standards defines a conceptual level data model as well as encodings for these datasets.

The OGC Observations and Measurements - XML Implementation (OGC 10-025r1) Standard defines an XML encoding for the concepts defined in OGC Abstract Specification Topic 20 and will also be revised to accommodate the changes to the OGC Observations and Measurements Abstract Specification.

Notably, and in addition to the revision of the O&M XML Implementation Standard, there is an identified need to standardize an O&M data encoding for formats like JSON/GeoJSON. These formats are preferred in modern Web APIs, including those conforming to the OGC API - Features - Part 1: Core Draft Standard (OGC 17-069r2).

Both the Observations and Measurements conceptual data model and its standardized XML encoding are used extensively in Spatial Data Infrastructures such as in the EU INSPIRE. There is also on-going work to additionally provide INSPIRE O&M datasets in JSON/GeoJSON based formats, but no standard has yet been identified describing an interoperable way of doing this.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) seeks public comment on the draft charter for the new Geopose Standards Working Group (SWG).

The main purpose of this SWG will be to develop and propose a standard for geographically-anchored poses (geopose) with 6 degrees of freedom referenced to one or more standardized Coordinate Reference Systems.

The combination of position (up/down [z], left/right [x] and forward/backward [y]) and orientation (pitch, roll, and yaw) with 6 degrees of freedom for objects in computer graphics and robotics is usually referred to as the object’s “pose.” Pose can be expressed as being in relation to other objects and/or to the user. When a pose is defined relative to a geographical frame of reference or coordinate system, it will be called a geographically anchored pose, or ‘geopose’ for short.

An object with a geopose may be any real physical object. This includes objects such as AR display devices (proxy for a user’s eyes), vehicles, robots, or even a park bench. It may also be a digital object like a BIM model, a computer game asset, the origin and orientation of the local coordinate system of an AR device, or a point-cloud dataset.

All physical world objects inherently have a geographically-anchored pose. Unfortunately, there is not a standard for universally expressing the pose in a manner that can be interpreted and used across the range of modern computing platforms.

The ability to specify the geopose of any object will aid in interoperability between real world 3D spatial computing systems, such as those under development for autonomous vehicles, augmented reality (AR), 3D map visualization, or any digital representation of the physical world or part therein (digital twins).

Members of the Geopose SWG will work towards defining an interoperable way to express, record, transform, and share the geopose of objects in a consistent manner across different applications, users, devices, services, and platforms.

One example of the benefit of standardized geoposes concerns traffic awareness and management: describing the pose of moving cars and people in a universally consistent manner could lower the incidence of accidents and road deaths. The same real-time geopose of a vehicle or pedestrian could be shared and displayed in different systems including:

• a traffic visualization on a screen in another car,
• shown directly at its physical location in the AR glasses of a pedestrian that is around the corner for the car, or
• in the real-time world model used by an autonomous vehicle or delivery robot to help it navigate the world and avoid other vehicles or pedestrians.

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