1. OGC Standards for Geospatial Interoperability: from sensors to decision support
Presentation to 4th “GRID & e-Collaboration Workshop”
February 2009
George Percivall
OGC Chief Architect
Executive Director, Interoperability Program
© 2009 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

2. What Drives OGC Standards Development?
OGC members are tackling major interoperability challenges of next-generation data / service sharing and collaboration….
Developing new specifications for location-based services interoperability and spatially enabling the systems and enterprises
Sustainable Development
Aviation / Telematics
E-Government
OGC
Web
Services
Web Mapping
Insurance/Re-Insurance
Location-Based
Services
Earth Science / Earth Observation
Sensor Webs
Logistics / Asset Management
Defense & Intelligence
Disaster / Emergency Management
Modeling &
Simulation
Critical Infrastructure Protection
The development of OGC standards is driven not by the technical interest of the times, rather by the functional issues expressed by organizations dealing with a range of topics including regional planning, critical infrastructure protection, location based services provision, insurance risk management, etc. OGC programs – our working groups, interoperability initiatives, and outreach and communications programs offer conduits for addressing and resolving issues through the development, testing, verification and adoption of open geoprocessing standards. Ultimately, the standards produced by our consortium members offer a standards-based framework for enabling government and business enterprises with “plug and play” spatial capabilities, which are unencumbered by a single vendor architecture, computing platform, or network environment.
Multi-Source
Operations
Research Validation
Decision Support
Mobile Enterprise
Regional Planning
Urban Planning
Digital Rights Management
© 2009 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

3. © 2009 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.
OGC Works Closely With Standards Organizations and Consortia in the Technology Community
Primary Alliances for standards coordination
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
OASIS
International Organization for Standards (ISO)
National Emergency Number Association (NENA)
COMCARE
Digital Geospatial Information Working Group (DGIWG)
Open Mobile Alliance (OMA)
National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS)
IEEE Technical Committee 9 (Sensor Web)
Secondary alliances
Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association (GSDI)
Web3D
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization
International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI)
IEEE GRSS and ICEO
Taxonomic Data Working Group (TDWG)
Others
Geospatial interoperability is our mission and our expertise. OGC has alliances with other major standards and professional organizations to assure that geospatial interoperability is consistently addressed across the broader IT community. There is a growing body of internet standards that employ OGC standards (such as OGC Geography Markup Language) to consistently define and address “location” across the internet and wireless.
OGC standards have been incorporated into standards issued by OASIS, IETF and other standards organzations. OGC routinely nominates its standards for ISO adoption.
© 2009 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

4. Copyright © 2009, Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.
OGC Web Services (OWS)
Just as is the dial tone of the World Wide Web, and html / xml are the standard encodings, the geospatial web is enabled by OGC standards:
Web Map
Server
Web Coverage
Web Feature
Web Map Service (WMS)
Web Feature Service (WFS)
Web Coverage Service (WCS)
Catalogue (CSW)
Geography Markup Language (GML)
Web Map Context (WMC)
OGC KML
Others…
Relevant to geospatial information applications: Critical Infrastructure, Emergency Management, Weather, Climate, Homeland Security, Defense & Intelligence, Oceans Science, others
Copyright © 2009, Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

5. Geospatial Interoperability: From sensors to decision support services
OGC Web Services
Sensor Web Enablement
(SWE)
Geo- Processing Workflow
(GPW)
Decision Support Services
(DSS)
Measurements
Observations
Features
Recommendations
© 2009 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

6. Sensor Web Enablement (SWE)
© 2009 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

7. Basic Requirements for Sensor Web
Quickly discover sensors and sensor data (secure or public) that can meet my needs – location, observables, quality, ability to task
Obtain sensor information in a standard encoding that is understandable by me and my software
Readily access sensor observations in a common manner, and in a form specific to my needs
Task sensors, when possible, to meet my specific needs
Subscribe to and receive alerts when a sensor measures a particular phenomenon
© 2009 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

8. © 2009 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.
SWE Specifications
Information Models and Schema
Observations and Measurements (O&M) – Models and schema for semantic basis of measurements
Sensor Model Language (SensorML) - Models and schema for components, georegistration, response, process models
Transducer Markup Language - Data encoding that enables interoperability and fusion of dissimilar sensor data
Web Services
Sensor Observation Service - Access observations for a sensor or sensor constellation
Sensor Planning Service – Task sensor system for desired observations
Sensor Alert Service – Subscribe to alerts from sensor observations
Sensor Registries – Discover sensors and sensor observations
Built upon OGC, Web and Internet standards
© 2009 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

9. SWE and Geoprocessing Workflow
Access & Processing Node
CSW
WFS
CSW
WCS
WPS
Register
Measurement
Types
SPS
SOS
SAS
CSW
SOS
SAS
SOS !
Sensor Net
Mission Control Center
Copyright © 2009, Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

10. Web Processing Service
WPS-client
Communication over the web using HTTP
WPS
GetCapabilities
DescribeProcess
Execute
Algorithms Repository
Data Handler Repository … … … …
Algorithm 1
Data Handler A
Web Processing Service
© 2009 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

11. The OGC-OGF Collaboration
Promote best practices and international standardization for distributed geospatial data processing capabilities that is:
Transparent -- users is not aware of the infrastructure
Interoperable -- the resources work together
Scalable -- small local, to massive distributed platforms 11

12. Collaboration Described in IEEE Computer, Nov. 0812

13. Developing WPS interface to Grid
some Grid app
JSDL
process description
process execution
data input/output
inbuilt web service binding
lightweight
‘geo’-compatible
resource requirements
data staging
WPS
JSDL
Our focus is on encapsulating a Grid computing resource/application behind a WPS.
We adopt JSDL as the underlying Grid interface because it is standardised and becoming more and more widely deployed on Grid infrastructures.
Two choices for obtaining the JSDL input to the Grid: either supplied complete by User (and then passed through seamlessly by WPS), or constructed by the WPS on the basis of simplified parametrised WPS parameters for resource requirements and data staging.
The idea for the ‘lite’ option is that in most cases there will be just a handful of essential resource requirements a User may want to specify – e.g. amount of processing time required, amount of memory required, etc., rather than being concerned with all the low-level resource options supported by JSDL.
Development on-going in OWS-5 Testbed. Results in May 2008 include demonstration and specification profile
Bastian.Baranski, Univ Muenster and Andrew Woolf, STFC
Copyright © 2009 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

14. OWS Geo-Processing Workflow
WCS = Web Coverage Service
WCTS = Web Coordinate Transform. Service
WPS = Web Processing Service
WFS = Web Feature Service
Decision Support Client
Internet
WCS
WCTS
WPS
WFS
Web-based geospatial service chaining and decision support. How do we reliably and repeatedly combine results from several distributed services on the web to produce a result for a user? Service chaining is the term commonly used for the process of organizing disparate web based services into an orderly process. For instance, a raw image is sent to a service that performs a coordinate transformation. This services sends the transformed image to a classifier service that processes the image to highlight areas of active fire. The result of this service is sent to a user’s client along with other geospatial data such as vegetation overlays, transportation. Service chaining will play an important role in future capabilities. …
Web Servers
© 2009 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

15. OpenGIS Geography Markup Language
GML Encoding Specification
XML grammar for encoding geographic information
Includes features, coordinate reference systems, geometry, topology, time, units of measure. etc.
Co-branded as ISO 19136, consistent with ISO 191xx family
Profiles of GML
GML Point Profile
GML Simple Features Profile
GeoRSS
Numerous GML Application Schemas
AIXM: Aeronautical Information Exchange Model
CWML: Cyclone Warning Markup Language
dwGML: Digital Weather GML
GML Application Schema for Earth Observation products
GeoSciML: Geoscience Markup Language
CityGML, and many more…
© 2009 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

16. Digital Rights Management, Authentication and Access Control and OWS
Identity Provider
Authentication
Service
Client
Provider
conditions
OWS
Client
OWS
Client
GeoRM
Client
Enforcement Point
OWS
Service
Policies
Decision Point
OWS services “wrapped” with industry standards
Copyright © 2008, Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

17. OWS Decision Support Services
Decision maker at a single workstation, identifies resources anywhere, accesses the resources, brings into operational context, and integrates with other resources to support decision process
DSS
Client
Decision Maker/
Analyst
GeoDSS tools allow the decision maker to navigate this heterogeneous environment with minimal distraction from the issue at hand.
Goals
Exchange and access geoinfo within and across info communities
Tailor geoinfo for different communities
Build an integrated client that can assist in emergency response scenarios
Specify and build GeoVideo service and XML schemas for moving objects
Specify and implement a Feature Portrayal Service and example Symbology Encoding documents (for EMS and Mil-STD-2525B)
Access to WMS, WFS, WCS, CS/W, SOS, SPS, KML,
Workflow, Context, Feature & Coverage Portrayal in a multi-lingual, distributed services environment
© 2009 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

18. Geo-Portal Reference Architecture
Internet
Portal
Services
Geospatial Portal
Portrayal
Distributed
Geospatial
Data
Individual
Citizen
Access
Government and
Commercial
Catalog
© 2009 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

19. Variety of Clients for OWS
© 2009 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

20. © 2009 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.
© 2009 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

21. OGC Reference Model (ORM) www.opengeospatial.org/standards/orm
What is the purpose of the ORM?
Overview of OGC Standards Baseline
Insight into the current state of the work of the OGC
Basis for coordination and understanding of the OGC documents
Resource for defining architectures for specific applications
Why Read This Document?
Better understand the OGC Standards Baseline
Better understand the ongoing work of the OGC
Gain an understanding necessary to contribute to OGC process
Aid in implementing one or more of the OpenGIS Standards
© 2009 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

22. © 2009 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.
Questions & Comments
George Percivall
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
© 2009 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.