June 29th, 2015
OGC Requests Comment on Draft Charter for Hydrologic Features Standards Working Group

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June 29, 2015 — Members of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) request comments on the draft charter for an OGC Hydrologic Features (HY_Features) Standards Working Group (SWG).

The purpose of the proposed SWG is to progress the HY_Features hydrologic feature model to the state of an adopted OGC standard for a common and stable identification and referencing of hydrologic features.

Water information needs to be shared between many organisations. HY_Features in conjunction with the OGC WaterML2. standard provides a baseline for improving the way in which water information is organized, managed and shared.

Hydrologic features are the “unit of study” for water information, and a means is required to convey identity of such real-world water-objects through the data processing chain from observation to water information. The work undertaken in the OGC Hydrology DWG led to a series of water-related standards and best practices to manage at different levels of detail the identification, observation and representation of hydrologic features. Examples are the WaterML2.0 standard, the HY_Features common hydrologic feature model and the ongoing GroundWaterML2 work. Each standard is concerned with different aspects of hydrology and water information. In conjunction these standards support a common understanding of the Hydrology phenomenon, which provides the basis of linking application-specific concepts by referencing common semantics. This allows informations systems and Web services as well as domain-specific ontologies (such as the terms using in existing data products) to be linked using a common reference model.

The Hydrologic Feature standard will be split into 3 parts. This approach allows conceptual issues to be addressed separate from physical implementation.

• Part 1: A HY_Features conceptual model (OGC 14-111). The normative model is a machine-readable Unified Modeling Language (UML) artefact published by the OGC.
• Part 2: A GML implementation schema suitable for data transfer of HY_Features object instances, based on ISO 19136 Annex E encoding rules for Application Schema.
• Part 3: OWL and RDF  representation suitable for defining links between features that implement  the HY_Features model, to based on ISO 19150 encoding rules (when these become an accepted standard).

The draft charter is available for review at https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/64089. Comments should be sent via email to [email protected] and are due by 23 July, 2015.

The OGC is an international geospatial standards consortium of more than 500 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. Visit the OGC website athttp://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.