Hello all
Last week, an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) meeting was held in
Frascati (Italy) at the European Space Agency (ESA). The attendance was
about 200 peoples physically and 100 peoples virtually. A delegation
from the State Service of Ukraine for Geodesy, Cartography and Cadastre
traveled to this meeting with sponsorship from Natural Resources Canada
and UK Hydrographic Office and Ordnance Survey. Slides summarizing some
discussions are available there:
https://portal.ogc.org/files/?artifact_id=104117
(PDF format, 262 slides)
Below is my personal summary of some meetings I attended to, with a
focus on topics connected to Apache projects I'm aware of.
GeoAPI
GeoAPI provides a set of Java interfaces for using referencing services
(among others) in an implementation-neutral way. Work for GeoAPI 3.1 is
still progressing, with an OGC standard draft now built daily by a CI
system [1]. The main work remaining before GeoAPI 3.1 is ready for
submission is the upgrade of ISO 19111:2007 to ISO 19111:2019. Other
upgrades such as metadata (ISO 19115) and data quality (ISO 19157) are
done. New interfaces compared to GeoAPI 3.0 include features and
filters. This standard draft contains UML diagrams for giving some
overviews of key interfaces.
The GeoAPI 3.1 standard draft will need evaluation, comments or
criticism by other developers before it can submitted as an OGC
standard. Even if the draft is not completed yet, we will try to
organize biweekly 30 minutes meetings for discussing design decisions.
Coverage geometry & functions
Coverage geometry & functions, standardized by ISO 19123, is similar to
raster data but in a more generic way, without the restriction that
cells are quadrilateral. Raster data can been seen as a special cases of
ISO 19123. This standard will be important to Apache SIS, which does not
implement ISO 19123 yet but has designed its GridCoverage class in
anticipation for that. This standard is under revision by ISO and the
work is close to completion. The new series of ISO standards will be as
below, and also published as OGC standards:
* ISO 19123-1 — Coverage Fundamentals (equivalent to OGC Abstract Topic 6)
* ISO 19123-2 — Coverage Implementation Schema (equivalent to OGC CIS 1.1)
* ISO 19123-3 — Coverage Processing Fundamentals (equivalent to OGC WCPS)
* ISO 19123-4 — Coverage Services
WMO information system 2.0
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) was used to exchange data
with specific protocols and formats (e.g. GRIB). WMO is migrating to a
new system based on open standards, pub/sub and Web API. A video giving
more details is at [2]. This year (2023) is the pilot phase, with a
progressive transition to operational mode planed from 2025 to 2030. The
implication for Apache projects is that the use of OGC standards would
help to be ready to consume WMO data in a few years.
New working groups: Geo Data Cubes and Analysis-Ready Data
Two new working groups are created:
* Geodata cubes are multidimensional data associated with geospatial
information. They can be handled with formats such as netCDF or
HDF5. The new working group will identify API for accessing such
data and their metadata across encodings.
* Analysis-Ready data (ARD) are satellite data organized into a form
that allows immediate analysis with a minimum of user effort. The
current plan is to create ISO standards with one part for Land data,
one part for Ocean data, one part for Atmosphere data, etc.
Joint ASF/OSGeo/OGC Code sprint
OGC, Apache and another open source organization (OSGeo) will hold a
joint code-sprint in April 25-27. Participation is free and open to the
public. In previous years, Apache projects that participated included
SIS, Jena and more. This year, OGC working groups that have already
expressed an interest are MetOcean for the Environmental Data Retrieval
(EDR) API version 1.2.
Others
The following topics got special sessions during the meeting:
* Climate resilience pilot
* Health summit
* Marine
* Intelligent transportation systems
* Startups and scaleups session
[1]https://opengeospatial.github.io/ogcna-auto-review/23-016.html
[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6fmKC508BA
[3]https://www.ogc.org/news/developers-invited-to-the-2023-open-standards-and-open-source-software-code-sprint/
