<div dir="ltr">I've added an OGC/OSGeo BoF session:<div> <a href="http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2013_BirdsOfAFeather#OGC.2FOSGeo_meet_up">http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2013_BirdsOfAFeather#OGC.2FOSGeo_meet_up</a></div>
<div><br></div><div>"<span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13px;line-height:19.046875px">OGC and OSGeo have always been strongly linked, from our common roots in the early open source geospatial community, our 2008 MoU, and the ongoing benefits we continue to realize from each other's activities. As both organisations continue to lead at the top of their respective fields, are there ways that we can work more closely and provide greater support for each other's work?"</span></div>
<div><font color="#000000" face="sans-serif"><span style="line-height:19.046875px"><br></span></font></div><div><div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 12:16 AM, Denise McKenzie <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:dmckenzie@opengeospatial.org" target="_blank">dmckenzie@opengeospatial.org</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div text="#000000" bgcolor="#ffffff">
<p>Hello Ian, Adrian and OSGeo members,<br>
<br>
Thank you for the invitation to run a joint OGC/OSGeo birds of a feather
discussion at FOSS4G. It sounds like a great idea. I look forward to being
part of it. Ian, please let me know what I need to do in preparation for
the session.<br>
<br>
I would also like to offer our thanks to Adrian for his significant
contribution to the OGC both in standards development and the recent
Ideas4OGC process. <br>
<br>
Look forward to the upcoming discussions at FOSS4G.<br>
<br>
Cheers,<br>
Denise<br>
____________________________________________<br>
Denise McKenzie<br>
Executive Director, Marketing and Communications<br>
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)<br>
OGC: Making location count.<br>
<br>
<a href="http://au.linkedin.com/in/denisemckenzie" target="_blank">http://au.linkedin.com/in/denisemckenzie</a><br>
Skype: denise.mckenzie78, Twitter: @spatialred<br>
Mobile:<a href="tel:%2B%2044%20%280%29%20758%20111%208189" value="+447581118189" target="_blank">+ 44 (0) 758 111 8189</a><br>
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<br>
<br>
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</p><div><div class="h5">
<br><p>
</p><p>On 18 August 2013 23:01:15 Ian Edwards <u></u> wrote:</p>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">Hi Adrian,<div><br></div><div>Thank you very much for taking
the time to provide this really useful summary of everything that is going
on at OGC.</div><div><br></div><div>We're particularly grateful for
your recent efforts helping to structure the Ideas4OGC process following
the concerns that were raised by the GeoServices specification. We all
rely on OGC standards and everyone here feels much more comfortable knowing
that people like you work behind the scenes on behalf of our broad
community.</div>
<div><br></div><div>I'm copying in Denise from OGC to start an open
discussion on whether we could jointly host an OGC-OSGeo Bird of a Feather
session at FOSS4G in 4 weeks time. If Denise agrees then I'll add a
slot to the wiki:<br>
</div><div> <a href="http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2013_BirdsOfAFeather" target="_blank">http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2013_BirdsOfAFeather</a></div>
<div><br></div><div>I encourage other people on the list with an investment
in standards to consider taking the membership that is now available.
I'm happy to discuss this with anyone who is interested.</div><div><br>
</div><div>Ian</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Aug 15, 2013
at 4:14 PM, Adrian Custer <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:acuster@gmail.com" target="_blank">acuster@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">Hello
all,<br>
<br>
you have nicely allowed me to use one of the OSGeo membership slots for
OGC. As part of that, I am required to submit a report to you on OGC
activity, or, really, on my activity at the OGC. Since my activity at the
OGC is coming to an end, I submit this closing report to all of you.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
The OGC is continuing in much the same way with a major new
interoperability testbed starting up, new standards up for a vote, proposed
standards coming up for discussion and comment, and a TC meeting planned
for late September just outside Rome. Additionally, there is some activity
attempting to identify and propose solutions for some of the issues with
the OGC today.<br>
<br>
<br>
The 10th iteration of the OGC interoperability testbed has been announced:<br>
<a href="http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/initiatives/ows-10" target="_blank">http://www.opengeospatial.org/<u></u>projects/initiatives/ows-10</a>.<br>
The RFQ/CFP is available at<br>
<a href="http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/103" target="_blank">http://www.opengeospatial.org/<u></u>standards/requests/103</a>.<br>
A quickstart guide is<br>
<a href="http://www.opengeospatial.org/pub/www/ows10/rfq/quickstart.html" target="_blank">http://www.opengeospatial.org/<u></u>pub/www/ows10/rfq/quickstart.<u></u>html</a><br>
Responses are due by 5 pm EST on 26 August 2013.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Several standards are undergoing adoption votes including OpenMI version
2.0 and the CRS extension to WCS. There has been no general discussion
about either of these on the TC Discussion list so I presume they will be
adopted when the vote closes.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
WCS continues its incredible progress driven by the inexhaustible
productivity of Peter Baumann. I am less aware of the work of other groups
like catalog, processing services, feature services and observation
services. There is ongoing work on SPARQL and on the semantic web.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
The PubSub standards working group feel they are close to releasing their
draft specification for comment, first inside the OGC and then to the
public. The group is motivated by work on the next generation US Air
Traffic Control system and the need for actors to get regular updates, say
on weather in a flight corridor, over a specific period of time. The
specification provides a different messaging pattern from the standard
request-response pattern used by most OGC web services. The idea is that
some client could subscribe some recipient to a publication stream for a
period of time. They decided that subscriptions should be temporary and
expire. They also decided (but may be reconsidering) that the service
should be setup as a new, separate 'PubSub Service' rather than
being an extension to existing services. They have developed ways for the
service to provide its capabilities including defining its publication
offerings and any supported filtering system for the published messages. I
have worked with that group fairly intensely these past few months, trying
to help them with their writeup (introductory material) and their
injunctions. I think they have understood my ideas and now will have to
integrate what of those they find useful. Hopefully, that document will be
released for comment soon and for public comment thereafter because it may
interest some of you.<br>
<br>
<br>
The MetOcean folk must be very close to final publication of their
recommendations on the use of "time" and "elevation" in
OGC web services. Folk from several national meteorological agencies
arrived a few years ago wanting to serve the output of their general
circulation models as WMS layers. However, the results of any particular
parameter, say air temperature or wind speed, are available in many
different 'dimensions': according to the moment being predicted,
according to the moment the model run stopped accepting input data,
according to the last moment when this data should be used for some
purpose, and at various heights in the air column measured in multiple
different ways. Since they all use slightly different language to discuss
these 'dimensions' they needed to get on the same page semantically
and linguistically and, in particular, agree how to expose their data in a
way that would work for each of them, a way that they all could share, and
a way that would work for regular folk without special knowledge (i.e. with
sane defaults). They have started that standardization work by defining
rules for the use of the dimensions called 'TIME' and
'ELEVATION' in WMS. I have worked with them intensely this past
year helping them better organize their paper, and better express their
requirements. As a result we stumbled on a way to organize their work
systematically which helps give them confidence that they have tackled most
major issues. They sound happy with the results of their recent work. That
document should be officially published this year. You can follow the work
of the group on their public wiki:<br>
<a href="http://external.opengis.org/twiki_public/MetOceanDWG" target="_blank">http://external.opengis.org/<u></u>twiki_public/MetOceanDWG</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
The Web Map Service (WMS) standards working group has lost its steam and
its forwards momentum. There are a few outstanding issues on WMTS (Web Map
Tile service) that might be resolved in the next while. However, the
working group is down to three people attending regular meetings and no
progress being made. We recently tried to revive regular meetings again and
heard feedback from some NASA folk providing lots of earth surface imagery.
Then we worked through my proposal for an abstract fundamental map model to
underlie our work on WMS 2.0 and its future extensions. However, we have
not met again since then and with the fall work load arriving I am not
hopeful that much work will get done going forwards. I expect the group
will eventually dissolve. Fortunately, all the work we have done is up on a
wiki so it should be easy for some future effort to review our work and
decisions.<br>
<br>
My work on WMS 2.0 has failed. I have spent the past two or three years
working intensely on a fully defined, fully testable, fully modular WMS.
This work was motivated by the outstanding change requests pointing out
issues with WMS 1.3.0 in its handling of languages, in its handling of
dimensions, in its handling of axis-order issues, in its lack of a fully
defined XML message form, and in its inability to scale for the needs of
the meteorology community. The work was also motivated by new rules at the
OGC that our standards should be written more clearly, with all injunctions
visibly isolated, written against a specific 'target', accompanied
by tests (so that only injunctions which can actually be tested are made),
and grouped into coherent modules of injunctions. I was motivated by a
vision of how to write better standards, how to fully solve issues all the
way down to their theoretical foundations, and how to build OGC Services in
general which are well written, comprehensible, and unambiguous. I also
felt that if we required the use of something, say PNG, we ought to at
least read that specification, so I have read intensely fourty odd
standards of the IETF, the W3C, ISO and other organizations. The work
turned out to be huge: starting with a large ambition, it soon spread out
to become overwhelming. Also, I started with an active group and presumed I
would get help from others at the OGC along the way but, unfortunately, SWG
member activity dwindled to nothing and other groups at the OGC did not
provide the support I needed.<br>
<br>
Despite that, I made a lot of progress. I rewrote the OGC standard on how
to write standards into a coherent whole whose injunctions and tests helped
me write better drafts. (That is pending review indefinitely because,
despite being part of the OGC rules for new standards, there is no one to
read it and accept it as a new version.) I developed a new model of spatial
referencing based on an explicit description of all the semantic elements
required to spatially cross-reference positions on two different objects. I
then used that semantic model to analyze the current OGC abstract model and
the OGC data model and data structures for referencing information (ISO
19111). That analysis showed that the current model fails to correctly
define or express a 'datum' and is confused about how to define a
coordinate system. This does not matter in practice because most of the
time these are not needed in GIS systems, which need intra-crs transforms
instead. However, it does matter for imagery and I showed how we should fix
it and fixed it for PNG. (I even made an initial pass at a GeoPNG
specification.) I developed an abstract model of OGC Services which
considers a service as offering an endpoint over some transport system
which accepts messages which have an encoding, a form, and a semantic
model. This service model means that the injunctions made of the service
can all be about how it recognizes and handles those messages. Finally, I
developed an abstract model of maps which would eventually allow us to deal
with movies and slices through the atmosphere and map decorations and
piece-wise projections but which, at first, would quickly simplify down to
the layer stack model of current WMS. These abstract models all fed my work
defining injunctions for the use of encodings, message forms, and service
behaviour. For the encodings, I defined a restricted form of UTF-8 that
adopted UTF-8 suggestions as requirements and I defined several profiles of
common image formats (PNG, TIFF, GeoTIFF, ...) which serve primarily to
remove ambiguity about the initial 'orientation' of the image from
which spatial referencing will happen. For the message forms, I defined a
use of text restricted to non-problematic UCS code points, defined a
Key-Value form based on a formal ABNF grammar and its expression as either
part of the URL <query> element or as a text file, and also defined
three different 'forms' of XML: 'usable xml', 'bindable
xml' and 'canonical xml' which might be used in different
realms by WMS or its extensions. For the message semantics, I developed a
Map Request model based on the map model I discussed earlier and worked to
formalize some of the semantics of core OGC messages like the common XML
based exception report. Finally, I tackled the behaviour of services
starting with a lot of work trying to find a minimal set of proper
behaviour in the handling of HTTP for OGC web services to address the
network scalability issues at the heart of HTTP/1.1 without putting too
much work on the shoulders of implementations. We have now just gotten to
the 'fun' stuff, that is the proper behaviour of a Map Service
itself in the handling of map requests. One of the great difficulties of
all this work was figuring out how all the formal injunctions could
properly fit one on top of the other, starting with abstract rules for
generic services and working through more and more concrete versions of the
services. Anyhow, this was a fair bit of work and I got really far.
However, without support, feedback, or even encouragement, and with every
step along the way just broken enough that it needed fixing, it was too
much for me to bring this work to completion. It will be for the next
person to try to make progress on WMS, either within the OGC or outside it.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Finally, the OGC has embarked on a effort to take stock and address issues
in its structure, its activities, and its understanding of itself. This
self-reflection grew out of the recent fiasco that exploded all the way to
this OSGeo list regarding the attempt to take the ESRI GeoServices
specification and develop it into an OGC Standard. Someone at the OGC, the
Board of Directors and/or Staff, decided to launch a formal review and
called it the 'Ideas 4 OGC' effort. I joined that effort and
pitched in a lot of the early content you will find on the public wiki<br>
<a href="http://external.opengeospatial.org/twiki_public/Ideas4OGC" target="_blank">http://external.<u></u>opengeospatial.org/twiki_<u></u>public/Ideas4OGC</a><br>
and started some discussions, initially on the new TC-Discuss list, and
then on the list of this particular effort. The group is just now starting
to get organized and start actual work on the issues. The goal is to
produce a report by the end of September presenting these issues to
'the OGC' and suggesting possible avenues for the resolution of the
issues. Unfortunately, you cannot follow the work because the group has
decided to switch to an internal wiki partly due to some folk not being
allowed by their government employers to talk to the public. (Are you in
deep trouble when you sacrifice transparency in order to have a frank
discussion about the lack of transparency?) I pitched in a bunch of issues
and suggestions for their resolution so the OGC has material that it could
tackle if it decides it wants to. However, I am not interested in getting
the OGC to 'want to' or pushing to get some of these fairly serious
issues tackled. The biggest issue seems to me a lack of communication so
that no one knows what the different responsible committees have been
doing. A second major issue is that there is no oversight so that no one
can or does refocus the work of anyone else for the benefit of the whole.
My overall conclusion is that the Board of Directors needs to step up and
do its directing work. Personally, I doubt I will be able to foster the
changes needed to get the OGC working effectively writing clear standards,
building well architectured systems, or running effective services. I think
I have done what I could in the process and now it is for others to see it
through. Overall, I am not hopeful that the OGC is institutionally capable
of fixing itself and keeping itself fixed. However, the OGC will keep doing
useful, if less than stellar, work for a long time in its current state.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
So that is a personal take on the OGC and my activities there these past
few months.<br>
<br>
I have now resigned my membership in the OGC so there is another slot open
if any of you can be and want to be individual members of the OGC.<br>
Thanks again for letting me use one of the OSGeo membership slots at the
OGC,<br>
<br>
cheers,<br>
~adrian<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
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</blockquote></div><br></div>
</blockquote>
<p></p></div></div></div>
</blockquote></div><br></div></div></div>