[Biogeosdi] Report from OGC meeting

[Javier de la Torre]

Hey Lee,

Here I send you what I have written at my return from the OGC  
meeting. You asked me also for a comment on how i think TDWG should  
continue working with OGC. I will write that in a later message ok?

By the way... i couldnt find any news announcing the MoU between TDWG  
and OGC :(

Cheers.

---------
Report of the July 2007 OGC Technical Committee Meeting
---------------------
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) held its 61st Technical  
Committee and Planning Committee Meetings during the week of July 9,  
2007 in Paris. TDWG was there represented by Donald Hobern and Javier  
de la Torre who gave two presentations on the Earth Observation and  
Natural Resources and Environment Working Group.

OGC Technical Committees meetings are a fundamental tool for OGC  
process in building standards and assure interoperability. During a  
week, OGC members meet in different working groups, discuss and vote  
in the process of making or reviewing standards.

Thanks to the new MoU between TDWG & OGC (link here but I could not  
find any news item about this ???) now there can be a representation  
of TDWG in every OGC meeting and push the interest from the  
biodiversity informatics community in the development of geospatial  
standards.

In this meeting topics varied from Geographic Markup Language,  
coverages, the GEOSS project, Web Map Service, Sensor Web Enables and  
many more. During the Earth Observation, Natural Resources &  
Environment Working Group Meeting TDWG was presented in two different  
presentations from Donald Hobern and Javier de la Torre.

Donald Hobern presented (available here) the TDWG infrastructure  
project and GBIF. The new GBIF REST services were presented together  
with how TDWG is creating a new set of vocabularies that can be use  
by services which data has something to do with biodiversity.

Javier de la Torre presented (available here) the results of the  
BioGeoSDI meeting (link http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/ 
Geospatial/InteroperabilityWorkshop1) with a presentation that made  
emphasis on the use of primary data and niche modelling together with  
OGC and TDWG standards.

In the other hand there has been several presentations about the  
Global Earth System of Systems (GEOSS) and the pilot projects that  
are starting now. GEOSS have recently released their catalog service,  
a registry where geographic data providers and services can be found  
to create a truly world wide Spatial Data Infrastructure for the  
observation of the earth. For the moment only a few services are  
registered, but they plan in the upcomming months to complete the  
catalog with every service related to the observation of the earth.

Related to the observation of the earth, there is the Sensor Web  
Enabled (SWE) working group in OGC that has presented several papers  
in their continuos effort to provide an interoperability framework  
where all kind of sensors can "talk to each other" in a seamless way.

During the meeting the new OGC interoperability program, OWS-5, was  
discussed. This new initiative include  more than a hundred  
participants with a budget of at least a million dollars. The program  
is organized in 6 different threads: Sensor Web Enablement (SWE), Geo  
Processing Workflow (GPW), Information Communities' Semantics (ICS),  
CAD/GIS/BIM, Agile Geography, Compliance Testing (CITE). Significant  
work items include geospatial Web service chaining and workflow,  
enhancements to the KML language, practical application of the Sensor  
Web, and application of GML to real-world scenarios.

There were also discussions on the so called GeoAPI. Together with  
the creation of standards there are efforts to provide APIs that  
implement the standards so that different vendor, software producers,  
can implement them using the same interfaces. The API is available in  
sourceforge and is implemented in Java.

The Web Coverage Service (WCS) was also discussed. There is open  
discussions on implementing asynchronous services and the use of SOAP  
encodings, although this seems to be a general discussion among all  
OGC standards.

The meeting about OGC for the Mass was a very crowded one. The aim of  
the meeting was to identify current trends on the use of geospatial  
information on Internet. Things like GeoRSS, KML, WMS tiling, etc.  
Specially interesting is the process of making KML an OGC standard.  
This has been included in the OWS-5 initiative.

In general it has been a nice meeting with lot of ongoing  
discussions. The OGC procedures seems to work quite well and lots of  
discussion papers are being prepared continuously that expand or  
improve OGC vision and their standards.

[maybe you want some more personal comments Lee?]