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Most of today's oceanographic instruments implement non-standard manufacturer-defined command protocols. Likwise, instrument data formats are generally non-standard and manufacturer-defined.…
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Added on 9/17/10
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OGC® NewsDecember 2010* CONTENTS THIS MONTH'S MESSAGE* CTO'S REPORT ON NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2010 TC AND PC MEETING* PARLEZ-VOUS FRANÇAIS? – OGC'S REGIONAL FORUMS* WEBSITE OF THE MONTH: BHUVAN* OGC: 2010 THE YEAR IN REVIEW* TWO MUST-SEE VIDEOS* GML APPLICATION SCHEMAS GAINING MOMENTUM* NEW MEMBERS* OGC PRESS COVERAGE, TUTORIALS, VIDEOS, PRESENTATIONS, PAPERS AND BLOGS* OGC PRESS RELEASES* NEW COMPLIANT PRODUCTS* SPECIAL INVITATIONS* UPCOMING EVENTS* CONTACT* SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBEBack issues of OGC News are available.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------THIS MONTH'S MESSAGEBy David ArcturDirector, Interoperability ProgramsWhenever a large office building is being constructed, it seems like a longtime goes by at first, with very little visible progress. The foundation andinfrastructure are often below ground level and behind a fence, making it evenharder to see progress. But once the walls start to go up, every day bringsdramatic changes.We seem to have reached the "wall building" stage now, regarding OGC standardsin the geosciences. It was just 2 years ago, after 16 years of work within OGCon the core standards for mapping and sensor observations, that we first talkedwith the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) about letting us help shapetheir future standards. At the "First workshop on use of GIS/OGC standardsin meteorology"" OGC and WMO both realized that many members of the meteorologycommunity were using OGC WMS, WCS, and WFS standards in interesting ways, butdifferent than we expected, and not all the same, handling some concepts thatwere new for us, such as forecast time and mapping of weather variables liketemperature and pressure. The workshop, organized by the UK Met Office, theEuropean Centre for Mid to Long Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF), and MétéoFrance, was a first attempt to determine best practices for using and extendingOGC standards in European meteorology.Similarly in the hydrology field, the US-based Consortium for the Advancement ofHydrologic Science (CUAHSI) had been working for 8 years to evolve a service-oriented architecture for cataloguing time-series observations from the millionsof stream gauges in the US maintained by USGS, EPA, NOAA's National WeatherService, and various state agencies. As this system was coming online and beingadopted within USGS and NWS, CUAHSI realized that OGC could help ensure globalapplication of the architecture. They started working with us to adapt theirinitial customized SOA to OGC standards, which turned out to be a good fit. Butthey realized the need to draw in more hydrology domain scientists, so CUAHSIsent OGC to the WMO Commission for Hydrology (CHy) meeting in Geneva, just acouple weeks before the first meteorology workshop, to see what we coulddevelop.From the serendipity of these two meetings being co-located with meetings ofthe WMO's key domains grew a commitment between OGC and WMO, formalized a yearlater, to support each other's standards program through designated expertschairing the relevant working groups in both organizations. This goes beyondmeteorology and hydrology to include climate, oceanography, and atmosphericscience commissions within WMO. This ensures that WMO retains intellectualcontrol of the domain sciences of concern to them within OGC, while takingadvantage of OGC's strengths in convening interdisciplinary collaborativemeetings four times a year, around the world.Steven Ramage and I recently attended the "Third workshop on use ofGIS/OGC standards in meteorology" hosted by the UK Met Office at theirfacilities in Exeter, co-sponsored again by ECMWF and Météo France. Themeeting was attended by experts representing national agencies in weather,climate, aviation, and defence from Europe and now North America. (NOAA willhost the 2011 workshop). This year, OGC members on the European INSPIREThematic Working Group on Atmospheric Conditions and Meteorological GeographicFeatures are planning to implement the INSPIRE requirements for a limited partof the complete information model, through an OGC Interoperability Experiment.Still another thread of geosciences outreach for OGC is our participation inthe annual conferences of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Franciscoeach fall, and the European Geophysical Union (EGU) in Vienna each spring. Wehave chaired sessions at these conferences since 2008 within a newly createddomain section of both called Earth and Space Science Informatics (ESSI). Atthe AGU meeting just held, we saw that OGC standards and practices are beingincluded in the core architectures of important new NSF-funded observationnetworks and archives, such as DataONE.org and IEDAData.org. We also see newareas we need to work with, such as provenance automation and integratedmodeling frameworks. As an indication of growing recognition of the role we canplay in fostering interdisciplinary collaborations of domain scientists andcyber-infrastructure developers, we have been asked to be a sponsor at ESSI'sfuture meetings and to contribute to its publications. The future forgeosciences in the OGC is bright!On behalf of everyone on the OGC staff, I thank you for your support in 2010and wish you all a very happy and successful 2011!-------------------------------------------------------------------------------CTO’S REPORT ON NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2010 TC AND PC MEETINGBy Carl ReedExecutive Director, Specification Program, CTOFor the first time ever, the OGC Technical and Planning Committee meetings werehosted in Australia. Sponsored by CSIRO and hosted at the University of Sydney,over 120 professionals participated in the meetings. The Australian communitywas very well represented and exhibited a continued high interest and commitmentto the OGC and the use of OGC standards. Thirty two different OGC Working Groupsmet and worked on revisions to existing OGC standards, discussed requirementsand use cases, tangled with procedural and policy changes, and worked on severalnew OGC standards. Further, there were over 50 presentations on the use of OGCstandards. These presentations included updates on the HydrologyInteroperability Experiments, OGC Web Services Testbed 8.0, deployment of OGCstandards in warning and alerting applications, and ongoing OGC relatedstandards work in numerous domains, such as Aviation, 3D, Meteorology, andHydrology.Thanks to everyone who made the journey (short and long!) and helped make theSydney meetings very successful and productive.A slide set containing information on the approved motions and informativeannouncements can be downloaded from the portal:Cheers!-------------------------------------------------------------------------------PARLEZ-VOUS FRANÇAIS? – OGC'S REGIONAL FORUMSBy Athina TrakasDirector, European ServicesLanguage as well as cultural, political and administrative factors shape ourwork, thinking and decisions.As an international standards body that is addressing requirements andchallenges from various communities related to geospatial and location topics,the OGC addresses region-specific circumstances to a certain extent within itsmembership and work. This is done through cooperation among Consortium membersin a regional and national context and has led to various OGC forum activitiesaround the world.Those activities reflect the needs and culture of OGC members' regions orcountries, and they promote dialogue within a single culture, language and/orpolitical context. But there's no blueprint for all forums. They vary not onlyin the above-mentioned aspects, but also in their organisation, the connectionto stakeholder communities and leading players in each country.The OGC's emphasis on forum activities helps to bridge gaps between variousmembers. There are currently 7 active forums - all different in languages andorganised differently: the French Forum, the Iberian and Latin-American Forum(ILAF), the India Forum, the Italian Forum, the Korea Forum, the South-EastEuropean Forum, and the UK & Ireland Forum.Our European forums activities help the OGC gain stakeholder confidence inprograms like INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) andother National Spatial Data Infrastructure programs, and these activitieslead to better cooperation with government bodies such as the EuropeanCommission.The OGC's international standardization community benefits from regional forumsbecause they help to make OGC standards truly international. Internationalstandards must accommodate as many national and regional requirements andpriorities as possible. Also, uptake and deployment of international standardsdepend on outreach activities consistent with the language, culture, policyand political environment of many nations and regions. The organisationalstructure of the current active forums are quite different. In some cases theyinvolve simply an email reflector for information and discussions, and in othercases they involve regular meetings, maintenance of public websites and theorganisation of Interoperability Days. What is common to all of the OGC'sregional forums is that they depend on the leadership and participation ofOGC members in a country or region for their success.In the next newsletter we will provide a more detailed description of thevarious activities in one of the OGC regional forums.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------WEBSITE OF THE MONTH: BHUVANBhuvan [http://www.bhuvan.nrsc.gov.in/] (the name is derived from Bhuvana, theSanskrit word for Earth) is an initiative of Indian Space Research Organisation(ISRO), Department of Space, Government of India, to showcase Indian EarthObservation capabilities from the IRS series of satellites. The images showcasedon Bhuvan are from Multi-sensor, Multi-platform and Multi-temporal domains withcapabilities to overlay thematic information, interpreted from such imagery, asvector layers.All the Ministries involved in managing natural resources in the country atNational to local level become part of Bhuvan, as the national imperativeapplications are done jointly with them. This one-stop versatile Indian EarthObservation visualization system can be of vital use for planners, decisionmakers, social groups, village communities and individuals. Bhuvan provides agateway to explore and discover the virtual Earth in 2-Dimensional,3-Dimensional space with tremendous possibilities for adding value at the userend.Bhuvan enables users to share and overlay maps and geospatial feature datathrough services that implement the OGC Web Map Service (WMS) and Web FeatureService (WFS) interface standards and the OGC KML encoding standard. Theseservices are hosted by ISRO's National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC). Bhuvan'sversatile tools support development of interactive applications forvisualization, query and analysis.The Bhuvan 2D interface is built using OpenLayers - a popular, open source WMSclient. The 2D map browser provides map navigation, map panning, line drawing,point polygon, overview map, linear and areal measurement, and search. Adownloadable plug-in provides "fly-over" viewing capabilities with interactivemanipulation of view angle, distance, elevation and motion in a 3D landscape.Bhuvanites (Bhuvan Users) can create and place 3D models, 3D polygons, take"snapshots", measure distances and perform shadow analyses.Various services available in Bhuvan, such as land services, weather services,disaster services and ocean services cater to specific needs of the scientificcommunity and administrators, supporting their efforts to provide societalvalue.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------OGC: 2010 THE YEAR IN REVIEWBelow are some highlights of the OGC's 16th year:* Despite difficult world economic conditions, the OGC continued its year-over-year membership growth.* Two additional OGC Interoperability Program Director staff, Nadine Alamehand Luis Bermudez, were hired to provide highly skilled expertise to IPinitiatives. Both have PhDs in their chosen areas. Lance McKee, a long-time consultant to OGC, joined the staff as full-time Senior Staff Writerand Steven Ramage (previously the OGC business representative at1Spatial) joined to head up marketing and communications.* Two new membership levels, Associate GovFuture Local Membership andAssociate GovFuture Subnational Membership, were added in November toincrease participation by local, state and provincial organizations. TheGovFuture focus is not standards development, but rather implementation,business value, "best practice" and virtual forums (teleconferences,webinars, email lists, access to the OGC Portal etc.).* A Business Value Committee (a subcommittee of the Planning Committee) waschartered to help shape the message of value related to participation inthe OGC and the value of implementing OGC standards. The new committee hasa Chair from MobiLaps currently working at NASA, Marge Cole and two ViceChairs, Emmanuel Mondon from Erdas in Europe and Kylie Armstrong from CRC-SI/Landgate in Australia.* In 2010, the OGC Specification Program witnessed its highest level ofstandards activity since OGC's inception. Over 30 Standards Working Groupswere active in 2010. Lifecycle maintenance of existing OGC standards hasbecome a new priority. The following candidate standards were approved in2010:o Abstract Specifications Approved in 2010:- Linear Referencing- Observations and Measurements Modelo OGC Standards Approved in 2010:- Web Coverage Service 2.0- CS-W ebRIM for EO 1.0- Web Feature Service 2.0- Filter Encoding 2.0- SWE Common 2.0- Sensor Planning Service 2.0- SWE Services Model 2.0- Table Join Service 1.1- GML Simple Features profile 1.1* The following candidate standards are scheduled for completion in mid tolate 2011.o OGC Standards in-progress for approval in 2010 and 2011:- Moving Object Snapshot (GML)- SensorML 2.0- CityGML 2.0- WMS 2.0- WPS 2.0- GML 3.3- GeoSMS 1.0- Geosynchronization 1.0- GeoXACML 1.1- GML in JP 2000 2.0- EO Metadata Profile for O&M- GeoAPI 3.0- OMXML (Observations and Measurements - XML Schema)- GeoSPARQL1.0- cf-NetCDF 1.0- OWS Context- Ordering Service 1.0- PubSub 1.0- Simple Features 2.0- WFS Gazetteer application profileo Two candidate standards in progress are likely to play an importantrole in consumer applications and other application domains. Thefirst is the candidate Open GeoSMS standard, which defines a shortmessaging service (SMS) encoding to exchange lightweight locationinformation between different mobile devices or applications. Thesecond is the OGC candidate GeoSynchronization Service Standard thatdescribes an open standard interface to a software service. Itallows data collectors to propose changes to be made to a dataprovider's geospatial features (such as data about property lines,city population, vehicle location, etc.).* The Interoperability Program completed the following activities in 2010:o Testbeds: The OGC Web Services Phase 7 (OWS-7) Testbedsuccessfully. The OWS-8 Testbed planning completed with the releaseof a Request for Quotation / Call For Participation on 22 November.This $1.8M testbed is supported by ten US and European governmentand industry sponsors, and will conduct activity threads forObservation Fusion, Geosynchronization, Aviation, and Cross-Community Interoperability (data model semantics).o A major Fusion Standards Studycommissioned by the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency generatedkey industry and OGC member recommendations on sensor, feature anddecision fusion standards, several of which have been addressed in OWS-7and OWS-8 testbeds.o Pilot Initiatives- The OGC completed phase 3 of the Global Earth Observing Systemof Systems (GEOSS) Architecture Implementation Pilot.- GEOSS, INSPIRE and GMES an Action in Support (GIGAS)technical and program support to the multi-year European GIGASproject concluded in June 2010 with the issuance of finalGIGAS architectural recommendations.- OGC's participation in a European FP7 EO2HEAVEN projectcommenced in the latter half of 2010. This multi-year projectinvolves the OGC and FP7 consortium partners like iGSIconducting pilot initiatives related to health surveillancevia standards-based Earth Observation and other techniques.- FAA Special Activity Airspace Information Dissemination Pilot- will work to further extend the Federal Aviation Authority(FAA) System Wide Information Management (SWIM) Architectureto employ OGC web services. This effort builds on previoustestbed activities.o Interoperability Experiments- The OGC Hydrology Domain Working Groupis advancing two key Interoperability Experiments for SurfaceWater and Ground Water- The Authentication Interoperability Experimentis working to test standards-based mechanisms to transferauthentication between various OGC services.- The Shibboleth Interoperability Experiment commenced in 2010to advance best practices for implementing standards onfederated security in transactions involving geospatial dataand services.o Several new OGC IP initiatives are being formalized:- Department of Homeland Security Sensor StandardsRecommendation Study 3D Portrayal Interoperability Experiment- Participation in a proposal to the European Commissionregarding the Future Internet (FP7-2011-ICT-FI).* A new OGC Standards Fast Track process was developed and implemented in2010. This new process is in testing through the end of 2010. The FastTrack process speeds up the overall time taken to approve a candidatestandard and will allow staff to better engage in certain standardsactivities in areas such as lightweight standards for the Mass Market(consumer applications), to benefit Members and the IT community.* Cooperation continued between the OGC Specification Program and otherstandards organizations to ensure that location content and serviceinstances remain as consistent as possible through the standards stack asused in other domains. Success continues in OASIS, the IETF, ISO and theNational Emergency Number Association (NENA). For example, a variety ofOGC GML application schemas are part of mandatory standards for use in theNext Generation 911 program in North America.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------TWO MUST-SEE VIDEOSProfessor Steve Liang's GeoCENS (Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure forEnvironmental Sensing) group at the University of Calgary (an OGC member)developed a wonderful short video [http://vimeo.com/14431401] for a recentworkshop in Banff. GeoCENS is an open standard-based virtual globe sensor webbrowser for the biogeosciences. You can navigate the virtual globe to your areaof interests, and discover/query sensor readings (both real-time and historicaldata). Try it!A new video,"Automatic installation and operation of sensors in an IP network,"from MBARI and SARTI demonstrates how "plug and play" for oceanographicinstruments can be accomplished using standard PUCK and SensorML protocols. Moreinformation and software are available at http://www.mbari.org/pw,-------------------------------------------------------------------------------GML APPLICATION SCHEMAS GAINING MOMENTUM2010 has seen considerable OGC GML Application Schema development activity[http://www.ogcnetwork.net/node/210], both within OGC and in independentefforts. A list of GML application schemas has been posted and others are underdevelopment. Several OGC Technical Committee Domain Working Groups - Aviation,Hydrology, and Meteorology & Oceanography - have formed primarily to developGML Application Schemas.provides the basis for community-specific "Application Schemas" that supportdata interoperability within geospatial communities of interest. Suchcommunities benefit from OGC's unique offering of structure, process, standardsexpertise and outreach support. Participation provides national governmentagencies with a very cost-effective means of meeting their internationalcooperation goals.In the recent LinkedIn discussion in the GML Group, Ron Lake stated: "GML wasnot designed primarily to support file exchange - meaning that it was designedto enable data feeds of geographic content and transactions. This is borne outin its use in WFS (transactions/requests) and GeoRSS (GML) in data feeds. Notethat GML is also used as a storage model (see CityGML) and as a basis forcomplex data feeds (AIXM)." This is a good description of the versatility andusefulness of GML.
