What is special about Geospatial?

Open Source GIS solutions gain more and more attention in the Geoinformation sciences community over the past years. Now there are numerous usable and stable Open Source libraries and tools for spatial data management, customization and visualisation available. Open Source in general has a very strong relation to topic of Interoperability and Open GI Standards (e.g., Standards specified by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)).

The OpenRoutingService.org initiative has worked on the OGC Specification “Open Location Services” (OpenLS) Before the implementation of OpenRoutingService.org several other services based on open standards have been realized. In near futures these implementations should be available at http://www.freeOpenLS.org.

Since April 8th of this year OpenRoutingService.org is accessible online. The services uses free geodata from OpenStreetMaps (OSM) and provides routing functionality based on the OGC LopenLS Route Service Specification. The plan is to provide routing based on OSM also for other software systems or as web service. Currently the service is enhanced in case of functionality, because until now it is limited to Germany. The area of Germany in OSM covers more than 600.000 streets, which must be transformed into topological graphs for the routing module. During this transformation more then 1.3 million features are generated.

They have tested the performance with different routing-libraries (geotools, pgrouting) and algorithms (Dijkstra, A*).

One further interesting feature of OpenRoutingService.org is the “Avoid Area” function. Here the user can enter an area (e.g, dangerous area), which is excluded in the routing process.

[via: Zur Kopplung von OpenSource, OpenLS und OpenStreetMaps in OpenRouteService.org (Neis, P., Zipf, A.)]

Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.

KML was an defacto-Standard for visualization of geospatial data over the Internet. Now it’s an official standard, approved by the OGC.

Here the official announcement of the OGC:

Wayland, Mass., April 14, 2008 - The members of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) today announced the approval of the OpenGIS® KML Encoding Standard (OGC KML), marking KML’s transition into an open standard which will be maintained by the OGC. Developers will now have a standard approach for using KML to code and share visual geographic content in existing or future web-based online maps and 3D geospatial browsers like Google Earth^TM.

“We are pleased to see the adoption of KML as an OGC standard,” said Ron Lake, chairman and chief executive officer of Galdos Systems Inc. “We believe that this is a major step forward for the OGC and for the entire geographic information community, as it provides the first broadly accepted standard for the visualization of geographic information.”

“Geographic data adds tremendous value to the online experience. More and more people are looking for ways to incorporate location information into their online content,” said Michael Weiss-Malik, KML product manager for Google. “The standardization of KML makes it possible for both novice and expert users alike to publish and share geographical information in an open format. It’s not unlike web browsers’ standardized support for HTML, which allows any web browser to read any web page.”

KML version 2.2 was brought into the OGC consensus process by a submission team led by Google and Galdos Systems Inc.

KML is an XML-based programming language, originally developed to manage the display of geospatial data in Google Earth. It’s still used heavily in Google Earth but is also supported by a variety of vendors’ tools and mapping websites.

The OpenGIS KML 2.2 Encoding Standard formalizes the KML 2.2 model and language while remaining backwards compatible with existing KML 2.2 files and tools. In comparison with the Google^TM KML 2.2 Reference, the standard defines:

• the KML 2.2 geometry encoding and interpolation model
• an extension model in support of application profiles
• conformance requirements and test cases

The adopted OpenGIS KML 2.2 Encoding Standard (OGC KML) is available at
http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/kml/.

About the OGC

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 345 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/.

Google and Google Earth are trademarks of Google Inc.

[via OGC]

Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.

Everyone is talking about the SensorWeb, but what is this all about and where is the relation to Geoinformatics?

Wikipedia defines the sensorweb as follows:

The Sensor Web is a type of sensor network or geographic information system (GIS) that is especially well suited for environmental monitoring and control. The term describes a specific type of sensor network: an amorphous network of spatially distributed sensor platforms (pods) that wirelessly communicate with each other. This amorphous architecture is unique since it is both synchronous and router-free, making it distinct from the more typical TCP/IP-like network schemes. The architecture allows every pod to know what is going on with every other pod throughout the Sensor Web at each measurement cycle.

The basic concept of a network of sensors is not new. The novelty of the Sensor Web architecture lies in the ability of the individual pieces to act and coordinate as a whole. This immediately allows the system to be synchronous throughout, unlike many other networks. In addition, the individual pods of a Sensor Web are all equal with one another and a Sensor Web architecture does not require special gateways or routing to have each of the individual pieces communicate with one another or an end user. By definition, a Sensor Web is an autonomous, stand-alone, sensing entity that does not require the presence of the World Wide Web to function.

The term “Sensor Web” is sometimes used to refer to sensors connected to the Internet (or “World Wide Web”). Such terms are occasionally used in conjunction with projects of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) or SensorNet. In this case, the network architecture requires the Internet to link together the individual sensing elements. The OGC architecture is very different than that of a true Sensor Web system and requires schemes to bring together vastly different datasets, in the same way that TCP/IP is used to tie together vastly different pieces of hardware and computing platforms. Note also that a single Sensor Web may be an individual sensing element inputing into an OGC-type network.

Some further readings:

• The OGC(R) Releases Sensor Web Enablement White Paper by Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.
• OGC Demonstrates Sensor Web Decision Support Services by Sam Bacharach, Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.
• The Sensor Web’s Point of Beginning by Mark Reichardt, executive director of OGC’s ( http://www.opengis.org) outreach and community adoption program.

Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.

The members of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) have approved version 1.0 of the OpenGIS® Web Processing Service (WPS) Interface Standard.

The WPS standard defines an interface that facilitates the publishing of geospatial processes and makes it easier to write software clients that can discover and bind to those processes. Processes include any algorithm, calculation or model that operates on spatially referenced raster or vector data. Publishing means making available machine-readable binding information as well as human-readable metadata that allows service discovery and use.

A WPS can be used to define calculations as simple as subtracting one set of spatially referenced data from another (e.g., determining the difference in influenza cases between two different seasons), or as complicated as a hydrological model. The data required by the WPS can be delivered across a network or it can be made available at the server. This interface specification provides mechanisms to identify the spatially referenced data required by the calculation, initiate the calculation, and manage the output from the calculation so that the client can access it.

The OGC’s WPS standard will play an important role in automating workflows that involve geospatial data and geoprocessing services.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 345 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/.

[opengeospatial]

Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.