The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international industry consortium of 369 companies, government agencies and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface specifications. Several of these members originate from Europe and that is where Vector1 Media editor Jeff Thurston met with Mark Reichardt, president and CEO, Martin Klopfer, European Programs Director and Athina Trakas, OGC business development Europe for this interview at the recently held OGC Interoperability Days meetings.
V1 Magazine: What is your primary message today at OGC Interoperability Days?
Reichardt: Our primary message is that the work of the OGC has become an important business enabler in the market and that implementations of OGC standards are now in wide use. As you saw today, geospatial systems and as-built infrastructure systems are coming together in a way that fulfills a range of requirements in domains such as urban planning, provision of city services, routing, and emergency management. Additionally, the OGC has advanced geospatial standards to make it easier to publish, discover and task IP addressable sensors on the web; and to access, fuse and apply data from these sensors in a location and temporal context. This integration of sensor assets from across the web is a huge advancement in our ability to tap near real time information resources for improved, timely decision making for a range of requirements.
Our work could not have been done without the knowledge, energy and commitment of the OGC’s global membership, working collaboratively in a consensus process. Also, a really important consideration is that the OGC does not advance standards in a vacumn. To date we have partnerships with over twenty standards and professional organisations and have devised ways to collaborate on increasingly broad interoperability issues that cross standards organization boundaries. It’s an exciting time because the problems were solving are allowing us to tread in some more complex areas.
V1 Magazine: What trends are you seeing in Europe and how does that work support Europeans?
Trakas: Interoperability is a unique challenge for Europeans as compared to North America and other parts of the world because Europe is not a homogenous society. The work of the OGC allows different countries to collaborate and implement transnational applications, such as SDI applications..
Klopfer: In the audience today, we have about a 50-50 mix of OGC members and non-members from across Europe. OGC work is being discussed and the attendees are seeing first-hand how OGC issues can be used to address some of the issues they are dealing with. OGC standards, policies and procedures are of increasing interest to the European IT Community who wants to leverage the geospatial aspect in day to day information services. OGC has actively participated in a number of European Commission funded project since the 5th Framework Programme and continues to do so in selected strategic projects to support the European Membership efforts in the global standardization process.
V1 Magazine: What is the relationship of OGC to the ongoing Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE) initiative?
Reichardt: While the OGC is a global organization and the work is applied in different ways around the world, European members have developed a process that links key European programs addressing major issues such as the environment and security – the INSPIRE program is a good example. Europeans are leveraging the OGC international process to make sure that OGC standards meet the needs of these and other European requirements. OGC and ISO standards are part of the INSPIRE technical architecture and associated policy, which is helping to maximize interoperability for the sharing and application of geospatial information across Europe. And as experience is gained from the application of OGC and ISO geospatial standards in Europe, other OGC programs and regions receive valuable feedback regarding the utility of standards. This feedback lead to enhancements to existing standards as well as the creation of new standards to address new areas of interoperability need.
{sidebar id=147align=left} Initiatives like INSPIRE are incredibly important to keep the momentum going. As you can see today, OGC represents a mix of representatives from industry, government and academic/research institutions, many of whom are connected to INSPIRE in some form or another.
I also wish to point out that European priorities related to INSPIRE and other programs are often supported and amplified by similar requirements being advanced by OGC members representing organizations from other regions and nations around the world. This is certainly true for environment and security. The ability to combine standards interests in this way works to further clarify the Consortium’s priorities and strengthen the alignment of industry to work on standards that will have the broadest market applicability.
Trakas: The real bottom line is that OGC and INSPIRE have combined interests. One supports the other and their processes co-evolve.
Reichardt: Europe is quite deliberate as it moves forward in terms of environment and security, for example, and it’s interesting to see standards moving forward as they are vetted through the full range of OGC committees, working groups and interoperability initiatives.
V1 Magazine: How does your work apply to cross-border initiatives where people are running into trans-boundary issues?
Reichardt: This is a great question, and it serves to exemplify what the OGC is all about. As we know, issues such as disasters very often do not respect jurisdictional boundaries. The ability to apply the context of location is incredibly important in improving decision making on cross-boundary issues. In the context of OGC’s standards work, our process yields open standards that essentially allow geospatial information from different sources to be discovered, accessed, fused and applied quickly on a range of issues. For geospatial information and services, OGC standards allow user communities to reduce the data sharing problem to one of policy. When open standards based technologies are used as the underpinning of IT programs, organizations can worry much less about technology interoperability and focus more on establishing the necessary policy and service agreements necessary to enable sharing. It’s all about capacity building and awareness since many people involved in cross-border projects are addressing essentially the same or similar issues.
In the defense and security community, we often talk about establishing a “Common Operating Picture” for achieving situational awareness, but in actuality people need to customize their views based on their specific responsibilities and roles in a program or activity. This could not be more true than in the context of cross boarder activities. OGC standards based solutions enable decision makers to establish their own view of a common issue.
But none of this will work without putting policies in place to enable information to be shared. In the OGC testbeds and pilot initiatives we are seeing increased emphasis on policy driven interoperability requirements. In other words, we are using OGC programs to develop best practices in applying standards that ultimately shape and transform policy to be more responsive to the needs of organizations. As technology changes, we find that as we move along to business cases and business processes, there are not many arguments or disagreements, since the standards issues have largely been worked through by those involved. Our test-beds provide a way for people to work through issues together.
Klopfer: We also have good working relationships with the Joint Research Commission (JRC) and other European agencies such as the European Environment Agency, European Union Satellite Center and the European Space Agency. These organizations are all members of the OGC, and they participate actively in the OGC process to feed their needs into our processes and it works to both organisations’ advantage.
V1 Magazine: How is this work being implemented at the European level and related to governance?
Reichardt: At the organizational, national government and pan European government levels, we are seeing the inclusion of OGC standards in a range of organizational “best practice” recommendations as well as in broader local, national and European policy. This is indeed an appropriate step in the maturation process for geospatial interoperability in support of vital programs. Best practices and policies that favor open standards like those of the OGC serve not only to enable interoperability across programs of use, but they also encourage further work by industry to implement existing standards and to work cooperatively in processes like the OGC to define and adopt new standards as needed by the European community.
We are also starting to see feedback in the Consortium from the European community about the use of our standards. We are learning what’s working well, what might need to be changed or enhanced, and what new standards may need to be developed to address gaps in interoperability. Through interaction with OGC’s global membership, European member organisations let us know what is working for them and what kinds of additional support are needed. This feedback process is an incredibly important aspect of OGC standards “life cycle management”.
V1 Magazine: What other initiatives does OGC have going to help Europeans?
Reichardt: We have a European Forum to support members. This provides a social forum for European members of the OGC – developers, IT integrators, government agencies, academic institutions and other industry representatives – to get together. It provides a way for discussion of issues in a European context, and affords members to have a dialogue on where European priorities and issues sit with respect to international issues and so on.
Trakas: A challenge in Europe has always been language differences. We need to keep the language hurdle low, thus we try to support people in their native language. OGC membership in France, for example, has developed an OGC France Forum which works closely to address the benefits and importance of OGC standards in the context of French programs and issues.
Reichardt: OGC National Forum activities such as those already chartered in the UK and more recently in France are indeed important. In general, these Forum activities focus less on specific technical issues and focus more on education, outreach and use of OGC standards in the context of national programs, culture and language.
{sidebar id=148 align=right} I should also point out that we’ve had strong European involvement in OGC interoperability initiatives such as OGC Web Services Testbeds and Pilot initiatives. These initiatives provide a rapid prototyping environment for OGC member organizations to development, test and validate new candidate standards in the context of requirements and use cases provided by the user community. We’ve seen strong participation by European companies, academic institutions and government agencies in past OGC Web Services testbeds. We are also seeing increased prioritization of European interoperability requirements in testbeds and pilots. For example, in conjunction with the European Space Agency and other OGC members, an OGC Federated Earth Observation Pilot was recently completed. This initiative tested OGC standards in the context of detailed ESA and other earth observation business cases. European requirements were also addressed in a recent GEOSS Architecture Implementation pilot. The OGC is also a member of the FP7 GIGAS program. GIGAS is working to recommend ways to harmonize the architecture of GEOSS, INSPIRE and GMES. OGC standards are used in all three of these initiatives. The harmonization of these initiatives will lead to greater interoperability and access to geospatial data for Europe.
Klopfer: Some countries are more active than others. They all have different issues and come from different approaches and with different needs. Most are aware, though, of the OpenGIS Web Feature Service (WFS) and Web Mapping Service (WMS) standards and the benefits they can leverage when building regional and national information infrastructure based on standards.
V1 Magazine: Digital Earth is happening and other Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) events are happening, how do they relate to OGC and what is coming in your future?
Reichardt: All of these efforts are complementary. The GSDI Association works to promote spatial data infrastructure best practices worldwide, from the local to international levels. The objective is, through an enabling SDI, to better enable cooperation and improved decision making at all levels on a range of important social, environmental and economic issues. OGC and ISO standards are a vital part of the GSDI best practice, and OGC staff and members are involved directly in GSDI program activities.
The International Conference on Digital Earth will be convened in Potsdam later this year. Here, too, OGC, ISO and other complementary standards are a core aspect of attaining the Digital Earth vision.
We’ve been able to standardize in many areas required for technical interoperability, but issues of semantics and language are key issues that remain. Metadata also remains a major issue. People need to understand metadata to work with it. We are increasingly moving to the point where we need to get through vast amounts of data in a simple way. It has to be processed quicker, better and in a more effective way. OGC is looking at semantics and ontologies. We are also looking at modeling and simulation as well as orchestrating work flows. These are key issues for GSDI and Digital Earth.
V1 Magazine: Is robotics and artificial intelligence part of the OGC future?
Reichardt: Yes, but I suspect not in the near term. There are other more fundamental standards activities that need to be addressed before we get into robotics. Standards activities such as geosemantics, 3-d visualization, and location services, including intelligent vehicles, are all steps towards being able to provide the geospatial intelligence that can be used in robotics and related artificial intelligence applications. Another OGC activity that is seeing increased emphasis is workflow management — how to bring together and properly orchestrate a series of distributed web services to support a particular decision process in a way that is ultimately transparent to the user. Robotics will depend on Web services. In the OGC’s Working Groups, we have technical work going on in Sensor Web Enablement, Geosemantics, GeoRM (rights management), 3D Information Management and Open Location Services, and these efforts all involve some members who are interested in robotics and artificial intelligence applications in the intelligence, ocean, disaster management, climate and environmental areas.
V1 Magazine: When do you think we will see the first undergraduate degrees in Open Standards?
Reichardt: Now there is an interesting question. We have about 90 academic and research institutions involved in OGC and a number of them have made great progress in integrating open standards instruction into their broader geomatics and IT curriculum. A number of these organizations do have courses that emphasize OGC and other open standards. I do know that many of our industry members are in need of skilled professionals with background not only in geomatics, but in computer sciences as well as knowledge of geospatial standards. Those students entering the market with a working knowledge and proficiency in OGC and other complementary standards will be valued by technology providers. They are interested to hire such people because then they can bring products to market quicker.
I would also like to point out the significant value of linking standards and standards programs with the applied research community. Researchers can benefit from using OGC and complementary standards to facilitate the rapid transfer of applied research results into practical applications. And as interoperability advances, as ICT capabilities increase, as data proliferates and the need for science grows, there is a serious need for interoperability research.
It is also the case that if all geospatial scientific data, including live sensor data, were put online using our standards and ISO metadata, the value of that data would be multiplied by the number of in-discipline, cross-discipline and longitudinal studies — and reviewers — that could use it. Science funders will eventually realize that they owe it to Science and humanity to make research grants contingent on grant recipients using these standards and making their data permanently available online.
V1 Magazine: Can you comment on the issues of privacy and security that seem to be rising up the geospatial agenda?
Reichardt: Another good question. These are important issues that have both technical and policy implications. We have an active geospatial rights management (GeoRM) Working Group applying tremendous rigor and professionalism to defining the requirements for standards that help provide solutions for rights management and security. With geospatial information, of course, this gets quite complex. GeoRM standards will need to operate both vertically and horizontally within the user community. OGC programs routinely include the testing and validation of OGC standards in the context of established open standards for security and privacy offered by the broader SDO community. Along these lines, OGC supports the Internet Engineering Task Force GeoPRIV working group. The GeoPRIV standard is all about location and privacy. Members have recently developed and adopted a geospatially enabled version of OASIS eXtensible Access Control Markup Language – XACML, aptly named “GeoXACML”. We could not have been as effective in areas like security and privacy without being aligned with many of the international standards bodies.
There are additional related issues that OGC is beginning to look at. The OGC Board recently formed a Spatial Law and Policy Sub-Committee to look at such issues as legal liability, Intellectual Property Rights and the “uniqueness of data” with respect to license agreements and purchase arrangements. With regard to liabilities, in particular, the idea is to explore the implications of accuracy and certification of data, as well as concepts of metadata requirements and “data ownership” in situations that have not been adequately examined in the context of previous case law. The issue of “ownership” in itself poses a set of very particular unexplored problems – who, for example, should have the right to access “private data” in times of emergency? In the age of privately owned satellites and commercial mash-ups conventional notions of data ownership are sure to evolve and modernize, and there is a growing need to educate ourselves and to get lawmakers educated and able to think creatively about the implication of these issues in the context of these new and evolving technologies.
Klopfer: While the case law is homogenous, more or less, across North America, that is not the case in Europe. There are not only differences between countries, but within countries in some places. Also, some models for data distribution in Europe require that large amounts of data must either be purchased or will not be available at all. This places a burden on the user who only needs small amounts of information. OGC offers a neutral platform for all stakeholders to voice common issues with information and data policies and governance issues. Hence it helps to drive the development of sound frameworks in support of a global information society.
