OGC publishes Testbed 10 Open Mobility location standards Engineering Reports

19 public Engineering Reports resulted from the Open Geospatial Consortium’s (OGC®) OGC Testbed 10, the most recent in the OGC’s yearly series of major geospatial interoperability testbeds. Six of these reports focused on Open Mobility, that is, on mobile users’ needs to create, access and share diverse types of location information maintained in diverse Web resources. Use cases and scenarios provided by Testbed 10 sponsors defined the interoperabiity requirements. The Engineering Reports document interoperability prototypes developed by the testbed’s participating technology providers. They describe work in progress on potential new standards and work done to validate candidate standards or improve adopted standards. This information may be useful to implementors of OGC standards, but OGC Engineering Reports do not represent official OGC positions.

The OGC Public Engineering Reports web page provides links to the engineering reports. (Select “Date” in the table header to see the most recent reports listed first.) Some are still being edited and have not yet been posted.

The Testbed 10 Open Mobility Engineering reports include:

• OGC Testbed 10 OWS Context in NIEM Engineering Report (14-017)
• OGC Testbed 10 GeoPackaging Engineering Report (14-058r1) (Still being edited. Will be posted soon.)
• OGC Testbed 10 Service Integration Engineering Report (14-013r1)
• OGC Testbed 10 Annotations Engineering Report (14-002)
• OGC Testbed 10 Rules for JSON and GeoJSON Adoption: Focus on OWS-Context Engineering Report (14-009r1)

Below are descriptions of some of these Engineering Reports.

The OpenMobility GeoPackaging Engineering Report describes a Web Processing Service profile for automating GeoPackage creation from OGC services and keeping the GeoPackage synchronized with other instances of the same data stored in other places and formats. The OGC GeoPackage Encoding Standard, announced earlier this year, is an open, standards-based, application and platform independent, self-describing universal file format for geodata. If a dataset has a dataset ID and a revision ID, then in many cases, as described in the report, it is possible to synchronize with another system that has the same dataset.

The OWS Context Annotations ER Engineering Report addresses the need to annotate a map – for example, add notes, circle areas, and add emphasis on particular features. This complements the basic geographic map definition specification of OWS Context, which specifies the data sets that comprise the map. A more general draft World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Open Annotation data model provided developers in Testbed 10 with the basis for a specialization of the model that applies to the particular requirements of annotating geospatial features and their graphical representations.

Rules for JSON and GeoJSON Adoption: Focus on OWS-Context addresses the fact that mobile client applications increasingly depend on information services distributed across cloud infrastructures. In this environment, the JSON encoding approach often provides advantages over theeXtensible Markup Language (XML). Most OGC implementation standards are written for implementation using XML, but XML and JSON can be used together to combine their advantages. The OGC Web Services Context Document Standard (OWS Context) was created to provide a standard way for a set of configured information resources (a service set) to be passed between applications. In a cloud services environment, transferring such a service set is often more useful and efficient than transferring the data delivered by those services. The report offers general guidelines for obtaining JSON documents directly from elements in existing XML documents and schemas. While its focus is on transforming OWS Context documents, the approach offers generic guidelines for defining and using JSON encodings with other OGC standards.

The OGC Testbed 10 Service Integration Engineering Report provides a technical description of changes to the OGC web service architecture baseline to support better integration among OGC web services. Such integration will enable better automated publishing and richer discovery of those services and related resources.

The OGC Testbed 10 Context in NIEM Engineering Report describes and evaluates options for integrating OWS Context documents in requests for information based on the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM). NIEM is a US government program to facilitate the exchange of data between multiple different Communities of Interest at all levels of government. The NIEM data model provides the reference vocabulary for consistent and reusable intra- and interdomain information exchange.

The sponsors of the upcoming OGC Testbed 11 activity are reviewing the results of Testbed 10 and developing new sets of interoperability requirements to be addressed by Testbed 11’s participating technology providers. OGC Testbed 11 requirements will undoubtedly include additional Open Mobility requirements.

Contact the OGC to learn more about OGC Testbed 11 and how you might get involved as a sponsor or technology provider participant.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 475 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 athttp://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.