OGC Requests

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is seeking public comment on the v1.1 update to the IndoorGML standard.

The goal of IndoorGML is to represent and allow for exchange of the location information required to build and operate indoor spatial services such as indoor navigation systems. Several standards, such as CityGML, KML, and IFC, have been published to describe 3D geometry and semantics of buildings for outdoor/indoor spaces, but they lack some important features that are specific to indoor spaces. IndoorGML aims to provide complementary and additional encoding features for indoor space. In this respect, IndoorGML is a complementary standard to CityGML, KML, and IFC.

IndoorGML v1.1 introduces a new feature for level (i.e. storey or floor) information as an additional attribute of cell space to respond to the requirements from many indoor spatial applications. IndoorGML v1.1 is fully compatible with the previous version IndoorGML v1.0.

The OGC IndoorGML Encoding Standard was developed to provide a common schema framework for interoperability between indoor spatial applications. These cover a broad spectrum of application areas such as indoor location services, indoor web map services, indoor emergency control, indoor IoT sensors, guiding services for visually handicapped persons in indoor space, and indoor robotics. Cross-platform, vendor-neutral communication of indoor spatial information is essential to meet the market demands of these applications.

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.