OGC Technical Committee Meeting

OGC members completed a very successful and productive OGC Technical Committee on November 11th 2005. There were special sessions and presentations on INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) and GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) and their requirements for interoperability and the use of international standards. Almost two hundred people attended the meetings.

Held in a hotel on the Rhine River in Bad Godesberg, a suburb of Bonn in Germany, working group meetings ran from eight in the morning until seven in the evening. In addition to the many OGC working groups there was also a special ISO/OGC joint editing committee meeting for the Web Feature Service. All this hard, focused work during the week resulted in over thirty motions and votes related to various OpenGIS Specification document actions. Some of the key motions included approval for:

• IPR review and electronic vote to approve the Metadata Application and ebRIM profiles of the Catalog 2.0.1 Specification
  
• IPR review and electronic vote to approve GML 3.2, which is also ISO 19136, as an official OpenGIS Specification
  
• initiation of an electronic vote to approve the GML Simple Feature Profile as an official OpenGIS Specification
  
• initiation of an electronic vote for final approval of GML in JPEG 2000 as an official OpenGIS Specification
  
• a Corrigendum (set of minor changes and schema fixes) for the Web Coverage Service (WCS).

Improving EC Links
Numerous other OGC-member developed documents were approved for public release. Of particular note is the extensive work done in the Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) and Geo Digital Rights Management (GeoDRM) Working Groups during the week. A package of documents was approved for public release, including SensorML as an OGC Best Practices document and Sensor Observation Service, Sensor Planning Service, and TransducerML being released as Discussion Papers. The members agreed to form submission teams as part of the process to move all four SWE documents forward for consideration as official OpenGIS Implementation Specifications. An important parallel activity during the week was meeting between OGC staff and as many as possible European OGC members to discuss how the OGC could better serve the requirements of the European Community. European member input will help the OGC formulate a stronger European outreach, education and training programme starting in 2006.
 
Simple Profiles
Finally, this was the first OGC meeting in which a number of discussions were held regarding standards and the consumer market. OpenGIS standards, while robust and well grounded in theory and practice and often semantically rich, are often well beyond what is required in the consumer market and ‘hacker’ space. There is thus general agreement on the need for a number of relatively simple profiles developed for a number of application areas. For example, early results of a collaboration on georss (geographically encoded objects for RSS) were presented.

Special thanks to Conterra, Hansa Luftbild, and the OGC for sponsoring these meetings. The next OGC meetings will be hosted in Huntsville, Alabama and sponsored by the University of Alabama (Huntsville), the Space and Rocket Center, and Intergraph Corporation.