Trevor Taylor, Director, Member Services - Asia & the Americas, takes readers through all the exciting happenings from the recent OGC TC Meetings held in Singapore. 

The meeting was hosted by NUS, sponsored by the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) and the Maritime and Ports Authority of Singapore (MPA), and included a special Monday evening reception sponsored by the UK Ordnance Survey. In addition to the many Working Group meetings, this TC Meeting featured OGC’s First Marine Summit and an Integrated Digital Built Environment (IDBE) Summit, as well as a meeting of the OGC Asia Forum.

During the recent OGC TC Meetings in Singapore, the OGC Marine Domain Working Group, in close cooperation with the International Hydrographic Organisation (IHO) and Singapore’s Maritime and Ports Authority of Singapore (MPA), organised the first OGC Marine Summit.

The purpose of the Summit was to: promote the value of interoperability and discoverability of marine spatial data (and MSDI); create awareness of data standards and applications applicable to marine data acquisition and use; explore the uses, challenges, and cutting-edge applications for geospatial data in the marine domain; and further the development of marine standards in both hydrographic and broader, non-hydrographic fields (e.g. ecology, energy, tourism, geology).

OGC’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) is responsible for developing OGC’s Technology Strategy and coordinating the strategy across all programs of the Consortium. Currently the main activities of the strategy relate to the OGC Architecture Board (OAB), OGC Technology Forecasting, and the evolution of the OGC Baseline. This column provides an update on those and related activities from the past three months.

Ingo Simonis, Testbed-14 Chief Architect, provides an overview of the final demonstration of Testbed-14 - the biggest Innovation Program initiative executed by OGC in 2018.

The demonstration event was held in December at ESA/ESRIN in Frascati, Italy, and focused on a set of selected results with a strong emphasis on the Enterprise Exploitation Platform task.

Derek Van Der Kamp, Environment and Climate Change Canada, and Tom Kralidis, Meteorological Service of Canada, provide an overview of the Canadian Centre for Climate Services’ use of OGC Web Services to provide 9 climate datasets from Environment and Climate Change Canada. An important factor of success in supplying this data is the use of international standards, which ensure the interoperability of information and data access across a wide range of networked data processing systems.

For the last six months, OGC has been sponsoring the Vector Tiles Pilot (VTP). The purpose of the VTP was to investigate how vector tiles (or tiled feature data, if you will) in the Mapbox Vector Tiles (MVT) and GeoJSON formats can be supported through the OGC standards baseline, particularly Web Feature Server (WFS), Web Map Tile Server (WMTS), and GeoPackage (GPKG). The initial effort concluded late last year and culminated in some videos and newly released Engineering Reports (ERs).

The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its associated Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can only be met through the use of data and information based on Earth observations. Although this type of data and information already supports the SDGs, its full potential has yet to be exploited. The newly-launched NextGEOSS data hub and platform will facilitate the fast and scalable transformation of Earth observation data into actionable information and knowledge across all 17 SDGs.

The second Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Energy & Utilities Summit brought together world-class researchers to demonstrate the benefits of implementing interoperable geospatial standards within the energy and utility sector. The December 2018 event, titled “Smart Energy Utilities, Communities, and Networks,” aimed to ensure that all electric energy stakeholders have access to technical solutions and data to address specific issues that arise from advances in smart energy technology.

To jointly advance accessibility of 3D geospatial content, The Khronos Group recently formalized a liaison with OGC. One of the first victories of this collaboration between the computer graphics and geospatial communities is a new OGC Community Standard addressing massive scale 3D, pioneered by longtime Khronos contributors, the Cesium team.

Also see our Press Release announcing OGC adopts 3D Tiles as Community Standard.

Executive Director Ivan DeLoatch on the changing role of the Federal Geographic Data Committee.

Cities sometimes fail to make sure the technologies they adopt are accessible to everyone. Activists and startups are working to change that.

Life is a lot easier when you can plug in to any socket.

An interesting map + story showing the spread of tea across the world, and how the two major distribution routes defined if a language refers to the leaf as (a variant of) ‘tea’ or ‘cha’.

Depending on how paranoid you are, this research from Stanford and Google will be either terrifying or fascinating. A machine learning agent intended to transform aerial images into street maps and back was found to be cheating by hiding information it would need later in “a nearly imperceptible, high-frequency signal.” Clever girl!

Beautiful maps of watersheds from across the world.

Pilot will leverage OGC standards, IoT sensors, geospatial framework data, and SCIRA design patterns to design and prototype interoperable Smart City services in support of public safety incident management and resilience.

The goal of the Open Routing API Pilot 2019 is to develop an API that allows requesting routes from different providers in a coherent, standardized way via Web protocols.

Visionary experts from Defense, Utilities, First Responders, and more will lead panels concerning the automation of workflows that bring 3D/4D geospatial content to users at ‘the edge’.

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

SELFIE aims to create a standards-based method to publish and use linked data that’s compatible with current web development/W3C best practices.

Tuesday April 2nd - Thursday April 4th

Taets Art & Event Park

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Sunday April 7th - Friday April 12th

Austria Center Vienna

Vienna, Austria

Monday April 8th - Wednesday April 10th

Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre (MCEC)

Melbourne, Australia

Wednesday April 24th - Thursday April 25th

Moz

Seattle, Washington, USA

Tuesday April 30th

SOFWERX

Tampa, FL, USA

Tuesday May 7th - Wednesday May 8th

Kongresszentrum “Inselhalle”

Lindau, Germany

Tuesday May 21st - Wednesday May 22nd

Business Design Centre

London, UK

#geobiz / #GeoDATA

geobusinessshow.com / geodataforum.com

Sunday June 2nd - Wednesday June 5th

Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center

San Antonio, Texas, USA

Thursday June 20th - Friday June 21st

Geovation Hub

London, UK

Monday June 24th - Friday June 28th

The House Of The Province Of Flemish Brabant

Leuven, Belgium