Re: SDW meeting this week: approve FPWD for SSN

Frans,

SensorThings is an approved OGC standard and is in the process of being published.

As to multiple standards doing the same or overlapping things: OGC decided in 2013 to allow overlap in standards capabilities to ensure that new technologies or approaches to the problem were inserted into our process. This can have multiple manifestations in reality:

1. truly competing standards that must fight-it-out in the marketplace;
2. competing standards that converge with time; or
3. independent standards with designed interoperability or use of yet a third standard/extension to provide interoperability.

The developers of SensorThings are participating in the SDWWG work (University of Calgary folks). I am glad that you brought up this overlap as we should address the use cases for each approach and identify if a degree of interoperability can be engineered into each effort (and related efforts such as SensorML).

Best Regards,
Scott

> On May 23, 2016, at 7:58 AM, Frans Knibbe <frans.knibbe@geodan.nl> wrote:
> 
> Hello Kerry,
> 
> A colleague just showed me his work on publishing and consuming sensor data. He uses the OGC SensorThings API <http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/sensorthings> and is happy with its capabilities and simplicity. I am not sure how far SensorThings API is in the process of becoming an official OGC standard, but it is clear that there is lots of overlap with SSN. In the introduction of the SSN FPWD it says it can be regarded as a modern replacement for OGC's Sensor Web Enablement standards. But the same thing can be said about the SensorThings API. So questions that come to mind are: 
> Why is the OGC working on development of two standards for the same thing? 
> If both SSN and the SensorThings API are to become OGC standards, to what extent are they interoperable?
> Is there some kind of collaboration between standards developers? 
> Is it possible to devote some words about other standards that are presently in development in the introduction? Perhaps the  W3C Generic Sensor API <https://w3c.github.io/sensors/> can also be mentioned?
> 
> Regards,
> Frans
> 
> 2016-05-23 8:48 GMT+02:00 Kerry Taylor <kerry.taylor@anu.edu.au <mailto:kerry.taylor@anu.edu.au>>:
> Hi all,
> 
> As planned, the editors of SSN would like to transition  the current SSN editors’ draft (http://w3c.github.io/sdw/ssn/ <http://w3c.github.io/sdw/ssn/> dated 23 May) to the status of “First public working draft” in the w3c and “discussion paper” in OGC.
> 
> Please do have a good look before the telecon this week, and do please remember that there is nothing final about this – it is much more a statement of intent and options  littered with “issues” than a specification.
> 
>  
> 
> --Kerry
> 
> 
>