OGC Update - Report on November '05 OGC Meetings in Bad Godesberg, Germany

December 11, 2005
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_On November 11, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) members completed a very successful and productive OGC Technical Committee.Special thanks to Conterra and Hansa Luftbild for sponsoring these meetings with the OGC.

Held in a hotel on the Rhine River in Bad Godesberg, a suburb of Bonn, Germany, Working Group meetings ran from 8 in the morning until 7 in the evening.Almost 200 individuals attended the meetings.There were special sessions and presentations on INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) and GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) and their requirements for interoperability and the use of international standards.In addition to the many OGC Working groups there was also an ISO/OGC joint project team meeting for the Web Feature Service.

All the hard, focused work during the week resulted in over 30 motions and votes related to various OpenGIS Specification document actions. Some of the key motions include approval for:
  • Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) review and electronic vote to approve the Metadata Application and ebRIM profiles of the Catalog 2.0.1 Specification
  • IPR review and electronic vote to approve GML 3.2, which is also ISO DIS 19136 as an official OpenGIS Specification
  • Initiation of an electronic vote to approve the GML Simple Feature Profile as an official OpenGIS Specification
  • Initiation of an electronic vote for final approval of GML in JPEG 2000 as an official OpenGIS Specification
  • A Corrigendum (set of minor changes and schema fixes) for the Web Coverage Service (WCS)
Numerous other OGC member developed documents were approved for public release.Of particular note is the extensive work done in the Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) Working Group during the week. A package of documents was approved for public release, including SensorML as an OGC Best Practices document as well as Sensor Observation Service, Sensor Planning Service, and TransducerML being released as Discussion Papers.The members agreed that submission teams will be formed as part of the process to move all four SWE documents forward for consideration as official OpenGIS Implementation Specifications.

An important parallel activity that occurred during the week was the meeting of OGC staff with as many European OGC members as possible to discuss how the OGC can better serve the requirements of the European Community.European member input will help the OGC formulate a stronger European outreach, education and training program starting in 2006.

Finally, this was the first OGC meeting in which a number of discussions were held regarding standards and the consumer market. OpenGIS standards - while robust, well grounded in theory and practice, and often semantically rich - are often well beyond what is required in the consumer market and "hacker" space.Therefore, there is general agreement that there needs to be a number of relatively simple profiles developed for a number of application areas.For example, early results of a collaboration on georss (geographically encoded objects for RSS) were presented.

The next OGC meetings will be hosted in Huntsville, Alabama and will be sponsored by Intergraph, the University of Alabama (Huntsville), and the US Space and Rocket Center.

(Note: The various types of OGC documents are described on the OGC website under the main menu item "Documents." OGC's formal specification process is set forth in OGC's "Technical Committee Policies and Procedures" document.)




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