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?]