Advances at the OGC and Opportunities for Harmonization with TDWG Standards

1. Advances at the OGCandOpportunities for Harmonization with TDWG Standards Phillip Dibner, Director of Research Programs OGC Interoperability Institute BIS/TDWG Annual Meeting, Bratislava September 19, 2007

2. Overview • The OGC: a Review • OGC-TDWG Collaboration • A New Institute: the OGCii • New OGC Standards (focus on O&M) • The GEOSS Architecture Implementation Pilot • The OGC Web Services Initiative, Phase 5 • KML as an OGC Standard

3. Review: The Open Geospatial Consortium • The OGC is an international industry consortium of more than 350 universities, public agencies, and companies. • Uses a consensus process to develop publicly available standards for interoperable geospatial web services • Conducts an Interoperability Program in which members collaborate remotely to introduce, draft, develop, test, and refine new technologies, in an iterative cycle that feeds into the Specification Program • Many consider the Interoperability Program key to OGC’s substantial progress in creating standards over the past several years, because of its focus on experimentation. • The process for these initiatives has itself evolved over time as various approaches have been tried, adapted, and adopted. • Most extensive element of this program has been the series of OGC Web Services (OWS) initiatives, now in Phase 5 (OWS-5)

4. Approved OpenGIS® Specifications • Tightly coupled • Simple Feature Access – OLE, SQL, CORBA • Grid Coverages • Catalog Services 2.0 • Web Services • Web Map Service (WMS) • Web Feature Service (WFS) • Web Coverage Service (WCS) • Geography Markup Language (GML) • Web Map Context • Coordinate Transformation • Sensor Web Enablement • SensorML • TransducerML • Observations and Measurements (O&M) • Sensor Observation Service (SOS) • Sensor Planning Service (SPS) • Sensor Alert Service (SAS) • Open Location Services (OpenLS) Available free of charge at www.opengeospatial.org (Standards) (Source: OGC)

5. OGC Collaboration with TDWG • During the past few years, TDWG / GBIF representatives have attended and presented at several OGC Technical Committee (TC) meetings. • R. Beaman: Jan 2004, Jan 2005, October 2006 • D. Hobern: Nov 2005, July 2007 • June 2006: • Many TDWG GIG members, TAG Architect, Implementors • TDWG GIG workshop on architecture and modeling • Extensive discussion with OGC Staff & Management • September 18, 2007: experimental videoconference - OGC EONRE / TDWG GIG • A Memorandum of Understanding was executed between TDWG and OGC in November, 2006 • Statement of intent to collaborate, and motivation: commitment to interoperability, complementary missions • 1-year term, automatically renewed • Mutual complimentary organizational membership, with designated representatives, • Cooperation in development of standards and profiles • Investigate opportunities for joint testbed, experiment, and pilot activities • Collaboration in development of educational and outreach materials, and of presentations to conferences, symposia, and other events • Document sharing as per the policies of both organizations

6. OGC can only go so far… • OGC focuses on developing specifications in response to requirements identified by its members. • But there are numerous issues that need attention that go beyond the scope of OGC members’ focus, and therefore must be addressed by a different mechanism. • OGC needs a longer-term, broader vision to guide its roadmap for developing future specifications and best practices. • There are communities that could benefit from OGC technology, but are not sufficiently aware of it or familiar with it.

7. A New Organization: OGCii • The OGC addresses the needs of industry & government. • Incentives from market forces and government requirements drive collaboration toward interoperability. • Members develop own requirements and bring them to OGC to be worked out in concert with each other. • The OGC Interoperability Institute has been constituted to help address the needs of the academic and other research communities, and to identify and apply their requirements to OGC’s own vision for future standards development. • OGCii can facilitate broader cooperation among scientific centers by engaging in research with diverse project groups that have interdisciplinary perspectives. • Through workshops, educational campaigns, and participation in proposal efforts, we can help develop requirements and reference architectures that can lead to OGC-style Interoperability Testbed projects.

8. Key Areas of Engagement • Semantics and ontologies • Security, privacy, digital rights management • Centralized vs. federated data stores and workflows • Human cognition and interaction models • Custodial practices • When to allow data to be shared and published • Maintaining persistent infrastructure for ongoing research • Managing permanent archival storage and retrieval • Overcoming institutional barriers • Materials and curriculum needed to support education for creating and improving interoperability

9. Targeted Research Opportunities • GEOSS Workshops (program committee) • Pennsylvania State Map (Phase 1 Reference Architecture completed) • GEON Collaboration (committed) • UK Forum for OGCii (University of Nottingham) • Various NSF Proposals • Cyberinfrastructure (INTEROP, PSCIC) • Informal Science Education (ISE) • Earth Science Instrumentation and Facilities (EAR/IF) • Cyberinfrastructure for Earth Sciences (Geoinformatics) • Interoperability Workshops for Geosciences and other Data Centers • Climate Change Workshops • Center Grant • Foundation Grants

10. OGCii Board of Directors • Robert Corell (The H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment; and American Meteorological Society)Chairman • David Schell (OGC, OGCii)Vice-Chairman andCEO • David Arctur (OGCii)President andCTO • Phillip Dibner (OGCii) Director, Research Programs • Malcolm Atkinson (University of Edinburgh; and Global Grid Forum) • Peter Backlund (NCAR/UCAR) • Roberta Balstad (Columbia University) • Fred Limp (University of Arkansas Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies) • David Maidment (University of Texas, Austin; and CUAHSI) • Amitabha Pande (Secretariat, Inter State Council, India) • George Percivall (OGC) • Fraser Taylor (Carleton University, Ottawa) • Fred Toppen (University of Utrecht, Netherlands) • John Werle (OGC Board of Directors) • 2 more seats TBD

11. OGCii Research Advisory Board Community Board of DirectorsDavid Schell, CEO President and CTODavid Arctur Director, Research ProgramsPhillip Dibner Network of University & Other Research Participants Proposal Team Proposal Team Proposal Team OGCii Operational Structure Project Ideas Legend: Facilitation ,Sponsorship …

12. New OGC Standards • Newly (or soon-to-be) released standards • Observations and Measurements (O&M) - comment period closed - awaiting edits and release by Revision Working Group • Sensor Observation Service (SOS) - awaiting release • Sensor Model Language (SensorML) - released Implementation Specification • Accessible at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards - or use the search facility • Some information about these specs has been presented before to TDWG. What’s new? Their status as released standards will ensure a level of stability, and encourage development of commercial and open-source tools. • For present purposes, we’ll consider O&M fundamental • The SOS provides an API for retrieving observation data • SensorML is in essence a language for defining processes and processing components associated with measurement and post-measurement transformation of observations.

13. The Observation Model Source: OGC document 05-087r4 A generic framework upon which domain-specific models can be built

14. Observation Model • An observation is an event: “an act through which a number, term, or other symbol is assigned to a phenomenon,” after Martin Fowler, 1998, Analysis Patterns: reusable object models. • The phenomenon is associated with an object, the feature of interest. • The observation uses a procedure, which may be an instrument or sensor, a human observer, a computation, simulation, process chain or other entity that produces a result. • The result is an estimate of the value of some property of the feature of interest. • The other object properties provide context or metadata for application or interpretation of the result. • More formally, an Observation is a specialized Event that has a result, where an Event is a feature type (ISO 19101 & friends - essentially an object type) that has a temporal object or time, which may be an instant or period, or an element of some topological construct (e.g., Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous)

15. Observation Specializations Source: OGC document 05-087r4

16. Observations - Additional Notes • The observed property may vary in space or time, and thus be a coverage (ISO 19123). In this case the result will also be a coverage, but one that samples the target feature, and therefore is discrete, and expressed, e.g., as a spatial array or a time series. • This model is quite general, and independent of the semantics attributed to the underlying domain. In particular, it’s neutral with respect to the relationship between a field observation and a collected specimen. • Terminology: “observation” is the general concept. “Measurement” refers to a scaled numeric quantity. • Model appears to be quite consistent with objectives and explicit details elucidated to date for TDWG observations model. (As always, there are some differences in vocabulary.)

17. GEOSS Architecture Implementation Pilot • The Group Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) is an international effort to coordinate the efforts of existing earth observation systems, identify gaps, promote interoperability, and ultimately improve delivery of services to users. Coordinated by the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), established in February 2005. • GEO Task AR-07-02: Architecture Implementation Pilot (AIP) • Lead incorporation of contributed components consistent with the GEOSS Architecture, via a Web Portal and Clearinghouse search facility, to provide access to services via GEOSS Interoperability Arrangements. • Evaluate, refine, document an operational GEOSS architecture • Register persistent services, for multiple application domains • Develop scenarios to exercise discovery and access mechanisms • Evaluate candidates for Portal and Clearinghouse • Record scenarios for video display at GEO Plenary and Ministerial in November 2007

18. GEOSS AIP ScenariosExtensive Deployment of OGC Components! • Wildland Fires in Africa • Access to harmonized geospatial data and tasking of sensors using OGC SWE components, alerts, and data services to track proximity of wildfires to power lines. Includes tasking of EO-1 satellite for image acquisition • Ecosystems and Biodiversity in Africa • WMS: species occurrence services (GBIF!), and other WMS/WFS/WCS server and client capabilities • Ecosystem and Biodiversity in Polar Regions • Pipeline route evaluation: WMS data services and clients • Response to Oil Spill • Hypothetical replay of a real-world spill. Catalog search and invocation of OWS services • Response to Volcano • Emergency response decision support; incorporates WMS, WCS • Response to Hurricane • Portal focus • Regional Decisions for Climate Change • Impacts on water resource management decisions

19. OGC Web Services, Phase 5 (OWS-5) • 5 “threads” of activity • Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) • Geoprocessing Workflow (GPW) • Agile Geography • Compliance Testing • CAD / GIS / BIM - • SWE - focused on application of existing specs to real-world implementations, and integration with workflows • GPW - process chaining and orchestration - more components than prior efforts, and development of APIs independent of the workflow implementation technology. Application to Enterprise environments. (Envision, e.g., geolocation of museum records a la BioGeomancer, but using independent, off-the-shelf components) • Agile Geography • Environment that extends the WFS-Transactional architecture to support loosely federated parties in maintaining a shared geospatial dataset. • KML, OWS Context, and in general lightweight payloads for digital cartography. KML to be an OGC Standard!

20. KML: Markup for Map FeaturesExample: Darfur Demonstration Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Crisis in Darfur - http://www.ushmm.org/googleearth/projects/darfur/

21. KML in NASA/USFS Western States Fire MissionReal-time Data Integration Courtesy Wildfire Research and Applications Partnership: http://geo.arc.nasa.gov/sge/WRAP/

22. OGC view of KML • Still very much in process, but some things are known: • KML represents a digital map, not a database/archive/repository, not for storage of data.  (Even Google doesn't use it for that.)  • I.e., a KML description is a view of data from the underlying source • Definitely going to add GIS-style metadata and the ability to contain some attribute data.   These are already present in beta form in KML2.  • Question: will we add invocation of other OGC services to KML documents?  Alternatively, use the emerging OWS Context specification - which provides for persistence of a set of queries against OGC services - and add KML to it as another service binding. • OGC wants to send just one message about how to do a digital map product. • Doesn't change direction regarding GML or any of the services.  • Internal status: draft requirements document posted to participants

23. Summary Remarks • OGC interoperability technologies are maturing substantially. Current focus is in application domains. • Still time to influence fundamental specifications, especially in the SWE domain • TDWG has a LOT of value to add - especially in exercising and stretching the early versions of several specs - especially Observations and Measurements • Profile will be raised by engagement, evaluation, and comment - recall that TDWG is an OGC Member! • Broad integration with Earth Science data sources will be immensely facilitated by harmonization with (or adoption of) these standards • There now exists an organization created explicitly to facilitate and collaborate with such efforts. The time is right, and OGCii stands ready!

24. Acknowledgements • Yale University Peabody Museum of Natural History • TDWG Infrastructure Project