OGC to form new GeoParquet Standards Working Group; Public Comment sought on Draft Charter

GeoParquet adds geospatial types to Apache Parquet to serve as an efficient cloud-native vector data format.

25 January 2023: The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is in the process of forming a new GeoParquet Standards Working Group (SWG). Public comment is sought on its draft charter. Comments are due by 15 February, 2023.

The OGC GeoParquet SWG will work to advance the GeoParquet encoding format to an OGC Encoding Standard for cloud-native vector data. GeoParquet adds geospatial types to Apache Parquet, described by Apache as "an open source, column-oriented data file format designed for efficient data storage and retrieval. It provides efficient data compression and encoding schemes with enhanced performance to handle complex data in bulk." For an introduction to the GeoParquet format, see this blog post.

GeoParquet started 3 years ago as a community effort by different Open Source Projects and organizations that have committed to its implementation and support. 

OGC is advancing a number of Standards to enable cloud-native geospatial ecosystems. GeoParquet fits in the group of data encoding Standards that are highly performant for large, cloud-based data stores, such as Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF for tiled rasters and Zarr for datacubes. GeoParquet will, in time, enable vector datasets to be as readily accessible from the cloud as the other formats already well-used in the community.

The GeoParquet SWG will take the initial efforts incubated in OGC’s GeoParquet GitHub repository as a draft specification from which a candidate Standard will be developed. As with many other recent OGC Standards, the repository will remain open to contributions from outside OGC and documentation will evolve in concert with prototype implementations.

GeoParquet will be another encoding of the OGC Simple Features Standard, and as such will handle all Simple Feature geometries. While other OGC Standards also encode Simple Features, GeoParquet is intended to be optimized for native use in cloud environments. It is expected that GeoParquet will be tested as an encoding to be accessed by the OGC APIs. The proposed SWG expects to have a candidate Standard ready for review and approval within one year of creation of the SWG.

The draft charter for the GeoParquet Standards Working Group is available for review and comment on the OGC Portal. Comments are due by 15 February, 2023, and should be submitted via the method outlined on the GeoParquet SWG draft charter public comment request page.

About OGC

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is a collective problem-solving community of more than 550 experts representing industry, government, research and academia, collaborating to make geospatial (location) information and services FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.

The global OGC Community engages in a mix of activities related to location-based technologies: developing consensus-based open standards and best-practices; collaborating on problem solving in agile innovation initiatives; participating in member meetings, events, and workshops; and more.

OGC's unique standards development process moves at the pace of innovation, with constant input from technology forecasting, practical prototyping, real-world testing, and community engagement.

OGC bridges disparate sectors, domains, and technology trends, and encourages the cross-pollination of ideas between different communities of practice to improve decision-making at all levels. OGC is committed to creating an inclusive and sustainable future.

Visit ogc.org for more info on our work.