gis-news » OGC

OGC Open GeoSMS standard now available

fjbehr — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:18:27 +0000

The OGC Open GeoSMS standard defines an encoding for location enabling a text message to be communicated using a Short Messages System (SMS) which could be applied in emergency cases.

The function of this (compared to toher standards quite small) OGC Open GeoSMS encoding standard is to facilitate communication of location content using the extended Short Message Service feature between different LBS (Location-Based Service) devices or applications for achieving interoperable communications while still maintaining human readability of the content. Namely, any application or service can simply leverage an extended SMS message using the Open GeoSMS format.

OGC announces IndoorGML Indoor Location Standards Working Group

fjbehr — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 13:47:18 +0000

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announced the formation of a new OGC Technical Committee Standards Working Group
(SWG) to advance the candidate OGC IndoorGML Standard. The OGC members invite the public to comment on the SWG charter and will consider comments received before 10 February 2012.

This SWG aims to provide a common schema framework for interoperability between indoor navigation applications, which cover a wide spectrum of application areas such as indoor LBS, indoor web map services, indoor emergency control, guiding services for visually handicapped persons in indoor space, and indoor robotics. Several commercial services for indoor spatial information have been recently launched such as Google Maps and Bing Indoor Maps. In order to meet the market demands from these application areas, we need indoor navigation information as an essential component. There are also strong demands for indoor navigation information from other standardization organizations including ISO/TC204 and IEEE RAS to extend existing standards to cover indoor space as well as outdoor space in a seamless way.

OGC Announces Webinar on CityGML — 3D Encoding for Landscapes and Municipal Assets

fjbehr — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 13:45:42 +0000

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®), in cooperation with Directions Media, invites the international geospatial community to participate in a one-hour webinar on 12 th January 2012 at 5:00pm UTC (12:00 noon EST).

The title of the webinar is, ” How the OGC’s CityGML Standard Supports 3D Innovation for Business and Government : Developments achieved in the Netherlands including use cases from the City of Rotterdam.”
Attendees will learn about the 3D Pilot NL, an award-winning collaborative pilot project to establish a national standard for 3D geo-information in the Netherlands. The Netherlands 3D standard is an implementation of the OGC CityGML Standard) (see also [1]), which is based on the OGC GML (Geography Markup Language) Standard. By joining CityGML with the existing national 2D standards framework, 3D Pilot NL laid the groundwork for one of the world’s most comprehensive national 3D geo-information infrastructures.
Speakers will describe how CityGML was integrated with the Netherlands’ national 2D standard and how open public sector CityGML data is being used by public and private sector application developers in Rotterdam, Europe’s largest seaport.

Steven Ramage, executive director marketing and communications of the OGC, said, “This is a really exciting standards-based development coming out of Europe. Using CityGML, local governments in the Netherlands and in other countries are creating open and semantically rich 3D data collections. These provide diverse stakeholders with a shared resource for municipal operations, urban development and economic development.”

Webinar agenda:

Introduction: Joe Francica , Directions Media
The OGC’s GovFuture Program: Steven Ramage , Executive Director Marketing and Communications, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
Introduction to CityGML: Carsten Roensdorf, Ordnance Survey Great Britain
The 3D Pilot NL: Jantien Stoter , Associate Professor, GISt, OTB, TU Delft;
Consultant Product and Process Innovation, Kadaster, Apeldoorn; and Consultant, Geo-ICT, Geonovum, Amersfoort
CityGML Applications in Rotterdam: Joris Goos , City of Rotterdam
Next Steps from a National Perspective: Jantien Stoter

Webinar details and registration are available here. The webinar will be in English.

This webinar is part of the OGC’s GovFuture program for local and subnational governments. The OGC’s affordable GovFuture-Local Government and GovFuture-Subnational Government membership levels [http://www.ogcnetwork.net/node/1568] offer local and sub-national governments unique online resources and an insight into global geospatial policy and technology developments. This OGC membership level focuses on the value of using standards in a government organization rather than on the process of creating and maintaining standards. Further, GovFuture members have an opportunity to network with their peers worldwide, with representatives from other levels of government, and with suppliers and universities through OGC events and communication channels.

[1] http://www.citygml.org/index.php?id=1531

Summary of the OGC GML 4.0 Workshop now available

fjbehr — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 18:26:13 +0000

On Monday September 19th, the OGC and UCAR hosted a one day workshop to discuss the next steps for GML. The summary of the workshop, given by Clemens Portele, is available here.

OGC Seeks Comments on Open GeoSMS – Candidate Standard for Location in Short Message Service

fjbehr — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 07:12:51 +0000

The candidate OGC Open GeoSMS Standard allows applications to location enable Short Message Service (SMS).

SMS is the text communication service component of phone, web and mobile communication systems. SMS uses standardized communications protocols that allow the exchange of short text messages between fixed line or mobile phone devices.

Open GeoSMS enables developers to use extended Short Message Service (SMS) to facilitate communication of location content between different LBS (Location-Based Service) devices or applications. The encoding is extremely light weight and the standards document is quite short.

The Taiwan Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) contributed this candidate standard to the OGC. Open GeoSMS is already in use in a number of deployed commercial applications in Taiwan as well as in a number of disaster response applications such as those provided by Sahana.

The candidate OGC Open GeoSMS Standard can be found at: http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/76. The period for issuing comments expires on 24 April 2011.

OGC Videos Highlight GEO’s progress implementing GEOSS

fjbehr — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 07:32:48 +0000

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®), as part of its lead role in the Architecture Implementation Pilot for the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), announced videos showing the remarkable progress that has been made in implementing GEOSS. GEOSS is a major multi-year program of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO). The videos were prepared for the GEO Ministerial Summit and GEO VII Plenary, held 3-5 November 2010 in Beijing, China.

Natural disasters such as the recent floods in Pakistan and the tsunami and volcano eruption in Indonesia require multinational cooperation and sharing of geospatial information and processing resources. To serve this goal, the GEOSS 10 Year Plan defined a bold vision to create a system of systems based on voluntary contributions and interoperability agreements. OGC standards along with other open standards and common practices have been used to create the GEOSS Common Infrastructure. With contributions from hundreds of organizations the GEOSS Pilot has led to substantial achievements, cross-cutting all Societal Benefit Areas.

Stefano Nativi of the Institute of Methodologies for Environmental Analysis (IMAA), part of the Department of Earth and Environment of the Italian National Research Council (CNR), said, “Currently, one of the major challenges for scientific community is the study of climate change effects on life on Earth. To achieve this, it is crucial to understand how climate change will impact on biodiversity and, in this context, several application scenarios require modeling the impact of climate change on distribution of individual species as well as on biodiversity loss in Protected Areas.”
Arnaud Cauchy of Spot Image, an EADS Astrium company, explained, “In Disaster Management, the benefit of interoperability could be evaluated by the number of human lives that have been preserved. In this context, rapid response is a major value that GEOSS brings. The AIP-3 Disaster Management Reference Scenario is a key contribution, helping participants to define efficient procedures and related GEOSS services to provide the right response at the right time to an emergency situation. The scenario demonstrates information flows involved in providing real-time updates to an evacuation plan during a flood disaster.”

The “GEOSS Architecture Progress” video (5 minutes) ( http://www.ogcnetwork.net/GeossArchProg ) provides an overview of the substantial progress made so far in implementing the bold plan established five years ago to build GEOSS. Five AIP-3 Demonstration Videos (each 5 minutes) ( http://www.ogcnetwork.net/geoss/aip-3/ ) show some of the work that has been done in GEOSS workshop demonstrations that have involved scores of participants over the last few years. The workshop scenarios address GEOSS Societal Benefit Areas such as energy, disaster management, biodiversity, and air quality.

OGC Forms GeoSMS Standards Working Group

fjbehr — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 05:29:53 +0000

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC(R)) announces the formation of an Open GeoSMS Standards Working Group (SWG) (http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/geosmsswg). The Open GeoSMS SWG will advance the OGC Candidate Open GeoSMS Standard as an OGC adopted standard. The GeoSMS candidate standard is currently an OGC “Discussion Paper”.

SMS text messages had an increased importance during the support of emergency cases in the Haiti Earthquake. Using the Ushahidi platform where people could submit messages indicating emergency situations by SMS text messages.

The candidate Open GeoSMS standard defines a short messaging service (SMS) encoding to exchange lightweight location information between different mobile devices or applications. Currently such devices or applications are often unable to share location information with each other because of technical incompatibilities between systems used by different device and platform vendors. This causes problems for users and imposes obstacles to industry growth. The GeoSMS encoding for location is compatible with other OGC standards, such as those for sensor webs and earth imaging. It is also compatible with standards such as the OASIS Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) standard and the IETF RFC Presence Information Data Format Location Object (PIDF-LO). The OGC works with OASIS, IETF and many other standards development organizations to make geospatial information and services an integral and fluid part of the world’s information infrastructure.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 395 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org.

OGC Recommends ‘Sensors Anywhere’ Book

fjbehr — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 20:46:07 +0000

The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC)® announces the availability of a new book “SANY – an open service architecture for sensor networks,” available free at http://sany-ip.eu/publications/3317. The book provides an excellent introduction to OGC’s Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards,
which enable developers to make all types of sensors, transducers and sensor data repositories discoverable, accessible and useable via the Web.

The acronym SANY stands for “Sensors Anywhere.” As a major Integrated Project in the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Commission, SANY extends the interoperability advances of an earlier European project, ORCHESTRA, into the domain of environmental sensor networks and standards-based sensor web enablement to support decision-making.

OGC SWE standards were applied in SANY to three innovative risk management applications involving air pollution, marine risks and geohazards. These efforts yielded valuable reference implementations
of sensor web Web services and geospatial processing Web services for decision support and data fusion.

SANY is the work of the SANY consortium, a group composed of 16 partners from seven EU member states (Austria, Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, Poland, United Kingdom) and one associated state
(Switzerland).

OGC Seeks Comments on Sensor Planning Service Standard 2.0

fjbehr — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 10:27:43 +0000

Draft standard specifies interfaces for tasking a sensor
The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) seeks public comment on the draft OGC Sensor Planning Service (SPS) Interface Standard 2.0. This draft standard specifies interfaces for tasking a sensor. The standard is designed to support queries that have the following purposes: to determine the feasibility of a sensor tasking request; to submit such a request; to inquire about the status of such a request; to update or cancel such a request; and to request information about other OGC Web services that provide access to the data collected by the requested task.

The proposed OGC SPS 2.0 standard and information on submitting comments on this document are available at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/64. The public comment period closes on 14 April, 2010.

OGC Seeks Comments on SWE Common Data Model

fjbehr — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:25:47 +0000

Standard provides a common data encoding that is used throughout the OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards suite
The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) seeks public comment on the draft OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) Common Encoding Standard Version 2.0. The SWE Common standard provides a common data encoding that is used throughout the OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards suite. More precisely, the SWE Common model is used to define the representation, nature, structure and encoding of sensor related data.

This model is used for describing static data (files) as well as dynamically generated datasets (on-the-fly processing), data subsets, process and web service inputs and outputs and real time streaming data. All categories of sensor observations are in scope ranging from simple in-situ temperature data to satellite imagery and full motion video streamed out of an aircraft.

The SWE Common language is an XML implementation of this model and is used by other existing OGC® Sensor Web Enablement standards such as Sensor Model Language (SensorML), Sensor Observation Service (SOS), Sensor Alert Service (SAS) and Sensor Planning Service (SPS).

The proposed OGC SWE Common 2.0 standard and information on submitting comments on this document are available here . The public comment period closes on 14 April 2010.