OGC’s ‘Director Regional Services, Europe, Central Asia & Africa,’ Athina Trakas, offers a synopsis of all that happened at OGC’s March TC meeting in Orléans, France.

OGC’s Lead Architect for Testbed Initiatives, Dr Ingo Simons, offers his insight on our latest:
On 10-12 April, 2018, the OGC kicked-off its most complex testbed ever (Testbed-14, or T14 for short), at least that’s what I think - although I am still in debate about this fact with our CTO, George Percivall. In any case, I think we have an exciting eight months ahead of us.

As part of the global celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8, OGC along with AGI & Geovation, coordinated a ‘Women in Geospatial’ breakfast at London’s Geovation Hub. Read a rundown by OGC’s Executive Director of Communication & Outreach, Denise McKenzie.

The core GeoPackage provides a base set of tables to store geographic, raster, feature, and attribute data. While maps contain the same information, more is expected from the output to make it consumable. For GeoPackage, this can be enabled through extensions. 
By David Wilson, Strategic Alliance Consulting, Inc

Peter Rushforth from the Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation discusses the development of proposed new standards for spatial information, ones that leverage the architectural style of the Web.

OGC’s Executive Director of the Standards Program, Scott Simmons, discusses the WFS3 Hackathon held in March.

OGC is currently leading a process to create a Smart City Interoperability Reference Architecture (SCIRA) that will provide free deployment guides and reusable patterns that municipalities can use to plan, acquire, and implement standards-based, cost-effective, vendor-agnostic, and future-proof smart city IT systems and networks using technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), Sensor Webs, and Geospatial Information.

Villages, and sometimes whole regions of the Congo, are misplaced—but the ministry of health and a team of cartographers are racing to get better data.

At this year’s FOSS4GNA get together in St Louis, Chris Holmes of Planet Labs gave an insightful overview of the application of deep learning to geospatial data, identifying opportunities for the open source community to lead in the application of this data and technology to addressing the challenge of automatically finding objects such as ships, trees, buildings etc in the vast amounts of sat imagery - and to track changes to them over time.

FOAM was invited to present its proposal for location-specific smart contracts — the Crypto-spatial Coordinate standard — for discussion at this year’s OGC Technical Meeting in Orleans, France.

The December 2017 TC/PC Meeting was held in Palmerston North, New Zealand. Prof. Jimmy and Dr. How from Feng Chia University attended the event, and have written a blog post outlining it.

How natural borders—apparently unquestionable and self-evident—are in fact exposed to the complexity of long-term ecological processes, unveiling the problem of territorial representation and its political implications.

Plans for more wired, networked, connected urban areas face challenges if they fail to account for existing, local, non-digital elements such as government and socioeconomic conditions

Members of the Canadian geomatics community have chartered the ‘Canada Forum on Geospatial Standards’ as a venue for collaboration on geospatial standardisation activities

Largest ever coordinated citizen science data collection campaign will collect one billion data points on air and water quality, pollution, human health, and other research topics by April 2020.

Sponsors wanted for our next major Innovation Initiative, Testbed 15. Topics could include: Smart Cities, Data Cubes, Discrete Global Grid Systems (DGGS), GeoPackage, Blockchain, UAV / UxS, Big Data Analytics, GeoSemantics / Linked Data, Cloud Workflows, Containers, Vector Tiles, etc. 

Pilot will further an implementation model, architecture, and prototypes for sharing Maritime Limits and Boundaries information.

European Space Agency upgrades to OGC’s highest level of membership to help drive standards and shape development priorities relevant to Earth Observation

Monday 4 June - Friday 8 June 2018

Lory Student Center at Colorado State University
Fort Collins, Colorado, USA
#OGC18FC
ogcmeet.org

Tuesday 5 June - Thursday 7 June 2018
Anaheim Convention Center
Anaheim, California, USA
#spar3d18
www.spar3d.com/event/

Monday 10 September - Friday 14 September 2018
Stuttgart, Germany
Further details TBA