RE: Provenance and observations and measurements

During today's call, someone mentioned the requirements for provenance associated with "measurements". I would add "Observations" to make focus on provenance for "Observations and Measurements". As one example, anyone using Google Maps/Earth, Bing, Worldwind, etc is accessing and using satellite data. Any satellite scene or swath is an observation. For that observation, there is a rich set of provenance information that is generated by the on-board sensor used to capture that satellite data. This information includes time, key information about the sensor, how the satellite data are processed (on board or on the ground), and forth.

The amount of data (observations) coming from sensors is increasing at an amazing rate - to the point that sensor data is now considered to be part of "Big Data". Sensors can be those that are on-board your internet connected mobile device to geolocated video assets to weather stations to airborne sensors to satellite. Since just about every sensor has a location or can provide its location, the OGC and ISO have defined and approved a standard known as "Observations and Measurements".

The O&M abstract model is here: http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=41579

The abstract model addresses various provenance requirements for observations and measurements as well as numerous other requirements/elements.

While the Newspaper use case is excellent, I believe we need a second provenance use case that is geo focused. Otherwise, a very large community of users may not be properly represented.

Regards

Carl Reed, PhD
CTO and Executive Director Specification Program
Open Geospatial Consortium
www.opengeospatial.org

The OGC: Making Location Count!

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