Open standards aren’t just about efficiency. They allow organizations across the globe to share information effectively and securely, and can provide much needed security for data. Standards provide governments and industry alike the ability to use tons of data for a range of use cases from citizen science to Defense and Intelligence and disaster relief.
A long-time user and supporter of OGC standards, the Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC), a division of Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), is Canada’s authoritative source for severe-weather alerts and weather, water, ice, and climate data.
One of the nation’s oldest government institutions, MSC is also one to keep up with the times, using the latest technologies in its quest to help Canadians make informed decisions about their health and safety and economic prosperity. One such example is the MSC GeoMet API platform, which, through the use of OGC API and other OGC standards, allows users to freely and quickly access thousands of real-time and archived weather, climate, and water datasets and products and integrate them in their domain-specific applications and decision support systems.
APIs have proven to be a popular and very effective enabler of rapid software development. This is more so in web mapping, where a combination of cartographic and software development skills is often needed to create maps for a global user base. As part of OGC’s on-going development of the OGC API suite of standards, OGC has been holding a series of Code Sprints. As part of this series, the May 2021 OGC API Virtual Code Sprint was conducted May 26–28, 2021.
With Ordnance Survey (OS) as Gold-level Sponsor and Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) as Silver-level Sponsor, the code sprint sought to progress the development of the draft OGC API standards for Maps, Tiles, and Styles. The sprint also sought to identify issues as well as options for addressing them.
A joint OGC / ESIP Coverage and Processing Analytics API development sprint was held on January 6-7, 2020. The Sprint was held in conjunction with the ESIP Winter Meeting. This sprint builds on the OGC API Hackathon in June 2019, and the OGC API Features and Catalogues Sprint in November 2019. The ESIP/OGC sprint focused on OGC API-Coverages, API-Processes, and API-Common as part of the overall development of OGC APIs.
OGC APIs usher in a new age for location information on the web, enabling a much simpler way to share and access location information that is consistent with the architecture of the Web. This API, the first of many, specifies the fundamental API building blocks for interacting with geospatial features.
By now many of you have heard about new OGC standards in work that leverage OpenAPI and are being characterized as anything from evolutionary to revolutionary. I’d like to give you a few minutes’ read to explain these exciting developments in OGC.
