- July 17, 2008
- Posted by: EARSC
- Category: EARSC News
WAYLAND, Mass.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) announced that on May 15 and 16, 2008, more than 40 researchers, members of the GEO (Group on Earth Observations) Secretariat and representatives of the European Commission met at the GEO offices in Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss concepts, ongoing activities, and requirements for future progress in the domain of Sensor Webs (http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/markets-technologies/swe). Organized by GEO Task DA-07-04 (Sensor Web Enablement), led by the Meraka Institute in South Africa and supported by the GEO Secretariat, the workshop was also supported and endorsed by: the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Pretoria, South Africa; the European Commission through the SANY and OSIRIS integrated projects; and the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC).
GEO’s GEOSS (Global Earth Observation System of Systems) seeks to integrate heterogeneous information systems across technical, semantic, institutional and political boundaries to enable continuous monitoring of the Earth and access by a wide variety of researchers to a vast shared set of information resources. Requirements are derived from applications in domains such as disasters, health, energy, and climate.
The great variety of Sensor Web research, implementation and usage in various application domains was reflected in 25 presentations given by workshop participants (http://www.ogcnetwork.net/node/383). Most of the implementations demonstrated use of open source software by the open source initiative 52°North (http://www.52north.org). The importance of standards was emphasized.
The next GEOSS Sensor Web workshop will take place in early 2009 in Japan.
The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 365 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OpenGIS® Standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org.
