Report from OGC meeting

Hi all,

I attended the OGC meeting in Orléans this week. This is a short report of things of interest to the IG.


  *   CityJSON was discussed in the CityGML standards working group (SWG). The reactions were positive and there was no objection to the possibility of a joint OGC/W3C working group for CityJSON (IGN, the French topographic mapping agency supported this idea explicitly). The advantage of having web expertise within the group was understood. CityGML SWG will consider endorsing CityJSON as an alternative encoding.
  *   While W3C works on a new version of DCAT, GeoDCAT is being brought forward for standardization at OGC. As I understand it this (having DCAT @ W3C, GeoDCAT @ OGC) was already discussed in the past. However the downside of developing GeoDCAT solely at OGC is that the awareness of it within open data and CKAN communities will be lower. Is there something we can do in the SDWIG to address this, e.g. do some communication on W3C side as well?
  *   The 'gap' of conneg for spatial data / how to get a specific representation of spatial data was mentioned by several people to me as something still to be addressed.
  *   WFS 3.0 core is already drafted and has at least 4 implementations. It is a topic in OGC testbed 14 and they just had a hackathon: https://github.com/opengeospatial/wfs3hackathon
Other OGC services standards are expected to follow WFS 3.0 lead in adopting SDWBP guidelines, but let the WFS 3.0 group work out the kinks first. OGC members will also be working on a JSON best practice. On the whole I see a nice evolution of OGC standards towards a more 'webby' flavor occurring!
  *   I presented about the SDWIG, what we are currently doing including the triaging process and the stats BP, in the opening plenary of the technical committee, in the GeoSemantics, Statistics and MetOcean groups.
     *   GeoSemantics DWG asks the SDWIG to play a role in keeping OGC members up to date on relevant developments at W3C. Perhaps we could make this a recurring agenda point.
     *   There was an ad hoc meeting of Statistics people who are planning to create a domain working group around this topic. I introduced our work to them and we briefly discussed ways to cooperate. Outcome: have an ad hoc joint session with them in Fort Collins to introduce them to the concepts of spatial (and statistical) data on the web and to discuss overlap of our groups and how we can cooperate. They were asking about the scope of the stats BP.
  *   Rob Smith presented WebVMT in the Unmanned vehicles domain working group. There was some useful feedback about standards that do geotagging for video (already some of this feedback was sent to us via github) and about possible patents that might be lurking out there. It was stressed that there should be a very clear description of WebVMT (and other funnel items) as to its goal and target audience as this would help determine its sweet spot in the standardization landscape.
Linda