In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Chris Holmes shares a pretty insightful and informative letter in an entry named 'Opening Esri'. Esri's closer relationship with open source started with providing code on GitHub last September and even up to last February's official entry named going open source with Esri.

From the Chris Holmes entry: "So I wanted to give to Esri a measurable roadmap of actions to take that would signal to me a real commitment to ‘open’. [...] Each piece of Esri technology ideally could be used stand alone with other pieces. Stated another way, there should be no lock-in of anything that users create – even their cartography rules. [...] it is a business risk, since it opens up more potential competition. But it’s also a big business opportunity if done right. And reaches beyond mere business to being a real force for good in the world, becoming a truly loved company, with lots of friends."

Can this be true? Finally a Shapefile replacement which would be a standard coming from the OGC? Maybe we're getting there! Here's an entry on the OGC Draft 'GeoPackage' Specification. You must take a look at the short presentation (below).

From Spatially Adjusted: "The specs are right what I’m looking for:

• SQLite container
• Vectors are Simple Features SQL (SpatiaLite)
• Support for Rasters and Tiles (SQL Tables and API)
• AtomPub

When I first saw it and the words OGC tied to it, I tried to hate it, I really did. But there is much here to like."

This is a topic we discussed a few times in the past in stories like: The future of the Shapefile format?, FOSS4G 2010 Notes: SpatiaLite, the Shapefile of the Future?, and The Shapefile 2.0 Manifesto.

OGC Plenary GeoPkg_SWG 2013-1-14

Via AGISRS I learned about the newly approved ISO Standard for Land Administration.

From the article: "The 'Land Administration Domain Model (LADM)' was approved as an official International ISO Standard on 1 November 2012. [...] The LADM covers basic information-related components of land administration (including those over water and land, and elements above and below the surface of the earth). The standard provides an abstract, conceptual model with four packages related to:

1. parties (people and organisations);
2. basic administrative units, rights, responsibilities, and restrictions (ownership rights);
3. spatial units (parcels, and the legal space of buildings and utility networks);
4. spatial sources (surveying), and spatial representations (geometry and topology);"

Eddie sent me this information on a webinar for September 26th on Serving Public Health through Open Health Mapping Services.

The invitation: "In this, the fourth GovFuture webinar presented by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and Directions Media, we look at how improved sharing of geospatial information plays an important role in improving public health.

Our featured presenter is Eddie Oldfield, BA, Director, NB Climate Change Hub at the New Brunswick Lung Association. He will describe his work in coordinating implementation of geospatial interoperability standards to exchange, integrate, and visualize distributed health and environmental information. Applications he has studied have addressed chronic illness, public health resources, critical infrastructure, pollution, meteorological information, and pandemic surveillance and control.

Eddie Oldfield's current work involves helping to create a national portal [or web map services] to bring together climate and health resources for decision-makers in public health, municipal emergency management, and local climate adaptation. The portal would aid in expanding public health heat alert and response, community resilience / disaster risk reduction, and modeling of historical and forecast impacts from climate on public health. The portal could enable decision-makers to use diverse data sources through services that implement the OGC Web Map Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS), and Web Processing Service (WPS) standards.

OGC and Directions Media invite you to join us in this webinar. GovFuture's quarterly webinars are designed to help people working in local and subnational (county, province, district etc.) governments worldwide make the best possible use of their ever-expanding location and geospatial information resources."

Google is discussing a stiry named How Google Is Remapping Public Transportation. We did mention quite a few times the GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) in the past.

Their summary: ""Google wants to 'organize the world's information,' but there isn't a marketplace or a category of knowledge it can organize without remaking it in the process. A case in point: public transportation. Largely outside the media spotlight, Google has wrought a quiet revolution over the last five years in the way commuters get schedule information for local buses and trains, and the way public transit agencies communicate with their riders. GTFS and GTFS-realtime, which Google invented, have become the de facto world standards for sharing transit data, and have opened up space for a whole ecosystem of third-party transit app developers. This in-depth article looks at the history of GTFS and Google's efforts to give people information (largely via their smartphones) that can help them plan their commutes on public transportation — and, not incidentally, drive a lot less.""

Specifically on the GTFS-realtime standard from the article: "To enable all that, Google introduced a new standard in 2011 called GTFS-realtime. It builds on GTFS, but is a different animal, since it includes new feed types for trip updates, service alerts, and vehicle positions, as well as provisions for constantly refreshing this data throughout the day. In an advisory to agencies, Google puts it this way: “Because GTFS-realtime allows you to present the actual status of your fleet, the feed needs to be updated regularly—preferably whenever new data comes in from your Automatic Vehicle Location system.”"

My latest blog post addresses:

• some of the issues in direct read/write to spatial databases
• confusion that arises from competing user and vendor needs
• an attempt to clarify  from a standards & metadata perspective

Via OSGeo-Discuss, I learned about a few recent news from 52° North. A reminder, what it is: "The open source software initiative 52°North is an international network of partners from research, industry and public administration."

• The open source smartEditor Online metadata tool has been updated to version 1.1. Since we only mentioned smartEditor in a press release before, "smartEditor is a web based editor to easily create and update ISO19115/19119 metadata documents on geospatial data sets, services, series and applications and many more resources. This tool provides templates, validation with error highlighting and comprehensive user support through comprehensive help texts and integrated code lists."
• The Sensor Observation Service (SOS) tool, SOS being an OGC standard, has been updated to 3.2.0, including new features and bug fixes. In short, "the Sensor Observation Service aggregates readings from live, in-situ and remote sensors." We mentioned it several times in the past.

Clearly the OGC is having quite a lot of announcements lately. Via internal email I learned about the press releases for the announcement of the XML Encoding Standard for Observations and Measurements.

From the O&M standard page: "This standard specifies an XML implementation for the OGC and ISO Observations and Measurements (O&M) conceptual model (OGC Observations and Measurements v2.0 also published as ISO/DIS 19156), including a schema for Sampling Features. This encoding is an essential dependency for the OGC Sensor Observation Service (SOS) Interface Standard. More specifically, this standard defines XML schemas for observations, and for features involved in sampling when making observations. These provide document models for the exchange of information describing observation acts and their results, both within and between different scientific and technical communities."

The OGC has been busy lately. Via internal email I learned of the press release announcing that the GeoAPI Implementation Standard is now an OGC standard.

The GeoAPI 3.0 overview: "The GeoAPI Implementation Standard defines, through the GeoAPI library, a Java language application programming interface (API) including a set of types and methods which can be used for the manipulation of geographic information structured following the specifications adopted by the Technical Committee 211 of the International Organization for (ISO) and by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). This standard standardizes the informatics contract between the client code which manipulates normalized data structures of geographic information based on the published API and the library code able both to instantiate and operate on these data structures according to the rules required by the published API and by the ISO and OGC standards."

We mentioned GeoAPI a few times in the past in the context of the open source GeoTools.

 Via internal mail, I learned about the OGC press release announcing that the Web Feature Service (WFS) standard has been accepted as an ISO standard.

From the press release: "I am very happy that once again, based upon the excellent co-operation with the OGC, we have been able to provide the geospatial community with an important International Standard," said Olaf Østensen, chairman of ISO/TC211. "The WFS Standard will enable sharing of geospatial information in an interoperable way, and it is already a core component in any spatial data infrastructure. Sharing and re-use of information are among the most important objectives of our standards development."

We of course mentioned WFS many times in the past, and WFS becoming an ISO standard certainly matters to many of us.