16 May, 2016 —The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) invites you to join us for our 99th Technical & Planning Committee (TC/PC) Meetings – to be hosted by University College Dublin in Dublin, Ireland from 20 June to 24 June, 2016.
This meeting will be partly framed by a theme of Citizen Science and use of public and open sources to collect and improve geospatial information. The event will be sponsored by the EU funded Citizen OBservatory WEB (COBWEB) project. In its fourth and final year COBWEB invites OGC Members to join them for an icebreaker event on the evening of Monday 20th June, and a side event on the afternoon of Tuesday 21st June. To register, please visit portal.opengeospatial.org/public_ogc/register/160621cobweb.php.
The week’s special events include the usual host of Domain and Standards Working Group meetings, as well as plenaries that will include addresses by Colin Bray (Chief Executive Ordnance Survey Ireland) and Martina Sindelar (Copernicus Group, European Commission). a Health Summit, the OGC European Forum and UK & Ireland Forum, several ad hoc meetings, and a variety of networking and social opportunities.
Over the course of the week you will hear how OGC standards have been used to make citizen sourced data discoverable and available at interfaces that make it easy for others to use, securely where necessary. COBWEB will demonstrate the use of semantics, quality assurance and different serialisations to make the data comprehensible. The COBWEB consortium hopes you will join them in discussion of how open interoperability standards can help unlock the huge potential latent in the wealth of citizen data and take forward work undertaken in COBWEB as the project finishes.
Occurring on Tuesday 21st June is the OGC Health Summit. The Summit provides an opportunity for participants to discuss key health application areas/requirements, learn about the use of OGC Standards in support of health applications, provide input into the development of OGC Standards, and to explore best practice use of the standards in the Health domain. To view the Summit agenda, location details, and to register (for free), please visit: portal.opengeospatial.org/public_ogc/register/160621health.php.
The OGC Health Summit is followed by the UNCAP Technology Showcase (also free) from 5-7pm, 21st June. To participate in the showcase, please register at: gistandards.com/registration/.
Two regional OGC forums will meet during the meeting week: the Europe Forum has two sessions (1pm on Monday and 10:15am on Tuesday) and the UK & Ireland Forum has one (3:15pm on Monday). These regional forums are open to members and non-members alike, and are designed to facilitate region-specific open geospatial standards discussion as a knowledge sharing facility.
Several ad hoc meetings will occur in Dublin to propose or advance plans for new Working Groups. These include: Planetary ad hoc to discuss geospatial systems for other planetary bodies; Citizen Science ad hoc for consideration of a focused Working Group on citizen observations; Marine ad hoc to finalize a charter for a Marine Domain Working Group to work on maritime matters; Smart Cities ad hoc to identify common activities in OGC with respect to Smart Cities that can be consolidated; a second meeting of the Land Administration ad hoc to finalize its DWG agenda; and SpectrumML ad hoc working toward creation of a new SWG.
The Spatial Data on the Web Working Group (SDWWG), a joint activity with W3C, will hold a face to face meeting on the morning of Thursday 23 June. Check www.w3.org/2015/spatial/wiki/Meetings for info as it’s announced.
The purpose of OGC Technical and Planning Committee meetings is to network, knowledge share and advance the development of Open Geospatial Standards. To enjoy access to all the standards meetings on offer during the week you will need to be an OGC member. However, the Opening & Closing plenaries, Regional Forums, Summits, Domain Working Groups and networking opportunities are open to participation for anyone that is interested in learning about and furthering the development of open geospatial standards (registration fees will apply to non-members).
Finally, OGC will celebrate its 100th Technical Meeting in Orlando, Florida on 19-23 September 2016. At this event we will acknowledge the incredible contributions our members have made over the previous 100 meetings as we look toward the next hundred, so be sure to mark the dates in your calendar now.
For the 99th OGC TC Meeting agenda, further details, and registration, visit ogcmeet.org.
About the OGC
The OGC is an international consortium of more than 515 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at www.opengeospatial.org.
