Open Geospatial Consortium Interoperability Day (Part One)
Topic: Geo Awareness, Intergraph, ESRI, Autodesk, eSpatial, Bentley, OGC, standards|The Geo Factor attended the OGC Interoperability Day yesterday in Tysons Corner, VA. The 320-member OGC develops and promotes location-based services (LBS) and geospatial standards through a consensus process. The morning session involved a multi-vendor (and a government agency) demonstration illustrating the tremendous potential of geospatial data sharing. The scenario was planning for an Olympics event in Tampa, Florida. Autodesk, Bentley, eSpatial, ESRI, Intergraph, and NASA participated, each representing a different government agency (water, DOT, etc.). The group resolved an increased need for water as well as an “unexpected” tanker crash causing an oil spill and gas plume near the city to show how easy it is to share geospatial data via modern OGC geospatial and other standards. And it all looked incredibly easy and productive. Drag, drop, click, select, zoom, and analyze. 2D, 3D, imagery, maps, and networks. As easy as typing in a URL. While such multi-vendor, multi-user sharing used to take months, it now can be done in hours. Why wouldn’t anyone use these standards (WMS, WFS, XML, SOAP, metadata catalogues)?
While there are some ongoing discussions on and changes upcoming to some of the OGC standards, the industry has clearly arrived regarding at least the major technical issues of geospatial data sharing. What remains to be tackled more completely are the people, process, licensing, and data quality challenges. While it is relatively straightforward to share data via standards-compliant transports, many people still closely guard access to their data. The processes and workflows for sharing scenarios can be complex and unclear, so they need to be worked out in advance of specific needs, such as an emergency. Quality is a concern when combining multiple data sources of varying scale and timeframes. Politics, planning, and privacy are some of the significant challenges facing organizations sharing geospatial data. However, the demonstration is cause to be optimistic about the potential for sharing geospatial data.