Between the Poles

Open Geospatial Consortium meeting on smart grid location standards

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is inviting interested parties to a Smart Grid Location Standards Meeting to be held on March 20 from 8:00-10:00 a.m. at the OGC Technical Committee Meeting in Austin, Texas, USA. This meeting is sponsored/hosted by the OGC, in cooperation with the University of Texas at Austin.  The OASIS eMIX (Energy Market Information Exchange) standard uses the OGC Geography Markup Languate (GML) Encoding Standard. The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) CIM (Common Information Model) standard is "harmonized" with WXXM (Weather Information Exchange Model), which is an industry profile based on GML. More standards coordination and development, however, is required to enable efficient geospatial communication within smart grids and between smart grids and "neighboring" activities such as emergency response, disaster management, urban planning and building energy management.  Many of the OGC's domains of activity – sensor webs, weather, indoor/outdoor location integration, 3D city models, location services, data fusion and others – have significance for the Smart Grid. Many OGC members have a stake in the Smart Grid information technology market, the growth of which depends on the evolution of a standards infrastructure that includes location standards.

This meeting (an "ad hoc" meeting in the OGC's formal meeting nomenclature) has been set up to assess the level of interest in the community to tackle open geospatial standards for the Smart Grid.  The Smart Grid Location Standards Ad Hoc meeting is open to the public and admission is free, but Smart Grid Location Standards Ad Hoc Meeting attendees who don't plan to attend other OGC Technical Committee sessions must register via email at register@opengeospatial.org.

OGC Open GeoSMS Standard approved

The OGC Open GeoSMS Standard is an extended Short Message Service (SMS) encoding and interface for exchanging location content between devices or applications. The OGC has just announced that the OGC membership has voted to adopt Open GeoSMS as an OGC standard.  The OGC Open GeoSMS Standard is available publicly.

OGC survey on the business value of open standards

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has announced a survey on the business value of open standards. The survey is a joint effort by two academic researchers who are OGC members and by the OGC Business Value Committee (BVC). Dr. Mu Xia at Santa Clara University and Dr. Kexin Zhao at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte developed the survey based on requirements from the OGC BVC to support their studies on standards effectiveness. The BVC will use a summary of the results to help the OGC better understand the value of the OGC’s open standards and improve its programs for geospatial standards development, compliance testing and outreach.

All OGC members as well as everyone involved with geospatial or location data, software and services are encouraged to participate in the survey.  To take the survey,

• if you are a technology user, go here.
• If you are a technology provider (software vendor, system integrator or a consultant), go here.

The survey takes about 10 to 15 minutes to complete. The survey period is 1st November through 18th December 2011.  The researchers will summarise the data gathered from the survey, removing all references to individual responses, and make the summary available to OGC Business Value Committee members. An executive summary will be provided to survey respondents.

FOSS4G: Open source geospatial newcomer event attracts a full house

Yesterday at the FOSS4G conference in Denver, one of the workshops that was new this year was a newcomer event targetted on folks who were new to FOSS4G and new to open source geospatial.  I've seen attendee counts that suggest tha attendance this year at FOSS4G will be around 900, an all time high for FOSS4G.  Of these an estimated 100+, according to a tweet I've seen from Arnulf Christl, president of OSGEO, attended the newcomer event, which suggests that a significant number of FOSS4G attendees are new to FOSS4G and new to open source geospatial. 

The newcomer event was moderated by Brian Timoney who besides moderating provided background on open source, open standards, and open data.  Peter Batty, chair of FOSS4G this year, gave the perspective of someone with an extensive background in proprietary, closed source software (Peter has worked at IBM, Smallworld, and Intergraph), who has found significant benefits in using open source software in his current role at Ubisense. 

I talked about why Autodesk saw an important role for open source in the area of interoperability, specificially for an Autodesk developed technology  called Feature Data Object (FDO) API which is designed to allow designers to directly access geospatial data without making copies.  As a concommittant, Autodesk supported the development of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) back in 2006.  Coincidentally, I was able to announce that just that morning Autodesk had released Revit Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) exporter as open source. I tend to use utility industry examples, and I was surprised to find that there was at least one utility person in the audience, from Xcel Energy.  I suspect that this is just the beginning of a trend and that in future FOSS4G events more folks from industries outside of government will be attending and discovering the role that open source has to play in their organizations.

Michael Byrne, GIO of the FCC and who used to be GIO of California, and Juan Marin also of the FCC gave a fascinating technical and business prespective on the  development of the National Broadband Map, which was developed in seven months from a standing start and got half a million hits in the first ten hours it was up.  Major business objectives mandated by Congress included searchability, interactivity and on-line.  His number one priority was the tight development timeline, 7 months, and his second priority was user response time.  Seven months is an incredibly tight development timeline for any eneterprise system.  Early in the development cycle, the team, which was only eight people, decided that a RESTful architecture (see GeoREST for an example) and open source geospatial software were the only way they were going to make this timeline.  They decided they needed to communicate directly with developers to be able to resolve problems in days, not months.  After deciding on the software stack, the system was developed in four and a half months and survived a deluge of traffic in its first hours and days.

Arnulf Christl, president of OSGEO, gave an impassioned perspective on the advantages of open source in the geospatial world.

Open standard for geotagging SMS text messages

At the recent GITA ANZ conference in Sydney, Mark Reichardt, President and CEO of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) mentioned in his talk that the OGC's GeoSMS standard for geotagging SMS or text messages had been adopted and would be released as a full standard later in 2011. 

There is a bit of confusion around the term "GeoSMS", but the major advantage of the OGC Open GeoSMS standard is that it is intended to be independent of hardware and software platform.

The OGC Implementation Specification is available.

Format

GeoSMS/Version Num;Latitude;Longitude;Format Type;Data Section

Examples

GeoSMS/2;2235.739,N;12133.851,E;B;
GeoSMS/2;2230.978,N;12123.566,E;E;TOWING_SERVICE
GeoSMS/2;2220.693,N;12133.521,E;E; DEBRIS_FLOW_ALERT

Standard Specifications and Drawings for Municipal Construction Projects and Data Quality

I have blogged in the past (here, here, here and here) about the poor data quality of utility records databases that has serious implications.  It can lead to  such things as unreliable reports prepared for management and for regulators, poor productivity of field staff, longer times to respond to outages, and longer times to deploy new services because the design data critical for serviceability calculations used to customer access to services such as broadband, cable, or power is either not available or unreliable.

One of the problems is the "as-built problem". The engineering design team typically use a CAD tool to design network infrastructure.  The network records group often use a traditional GIS application to maintain a record of the network infrastructure after it is constructed.  After construction is complete, construction drawings come back to the records team as paper drawings called as-builts.  Because of a perceived incompatibility between engineering design drawings and GIS requirements, records staff often redigitize construction drawings from paper into the records database.  As a result there is a backlog of as-builts waiting to be entered into the records database which can stretch anywhere from months to several years which means that the records database is always out of date.

At the URISA conference last week I heard a talk by Karen Stewart, who is based in British Columbia, in which she mentioned a set of standards for specifications and drawings for municipal construction projects that has been widely adopted in British Columbia. The Master Municipal Construction Documents Association maintains a set of templates for tendering and contract administration for municipal infrastructure projects that is geared toward government, consultants, contractors, and owners.  The documents are appropriate for municipal works projects, both underground and street level.

The documents include MMCD Templates for AutoCad Civil 3D for construction and record drawings that provide a common CAD standard that is is expected to enable comparability and consistency of presentation across the province.  The Civil 3D template project is focused on "internal drawing structure, external drawing presentation, and post construction GIS submissions".  This strikes me as having potentially far-reaching implications for municipal utilities because it is taking a standards-based approach toward resolving the as-built problem that arises from the inefficient way that engineering design data currently flows within many utilities.

FGDC US Address Standard Nears Completion

In 2005 URISA petitioned the Federal Geographic Data Committee to allow it to develop a standard for addresses in the US.  The petition was granted and the project to develope the United States Thoroughfare, Landmark, and Postal Address Data Standard was initiated.  The standard has been built on previous FGDC work by the URISA Address Standard Working Group with extensive consultation with NENA, USPS, ISO, and FGDC subcommittees and other interested organizations and individuals.  It was sponsored by the Subcommittee on Cultural and Demographic Data, URISA and NENA.

At the URISA conference last week, the URISA Address Standard Working Group gave an update on the development of the standard, which after a five year effort is on schedule for completion and formal sign-off by the FGDC early next year.

• June 16 - Completion of Public Review
• Sep 30 - Final version and adjudicated comments report to Standard Working Group
• Oct 30 - Standards Working Group Approval
• Jan 15, 2011 - Signature by Chair, FGDC Steering Committee and publication

Two profiles of the standard have been developed 

• USPS - To support USPS Publication 28 and UPU Standards
• NENA - To manage emergency address uses

Already a number of jurisdictions in North America have adopted the address standard including Massachusetts, Oregon, and British Columbia.

The aspect of the development of this standard which differentiates it from other Federally sponsored standards initiatives and makes it an exemplary model for similar types of initiatives is that this was a community process, which Martha Wells, who gave the presentation, called "outside the beltway", meaning that it was a grass roots project that was entirely done my volunteers, Martha Wells, Ed Wells, Carl Anderson, Sara Yurman, and Hilary Perkins, rather than by Federal bureaucrats.  Apparently, the only Federal money involved was a $20,000 grant at the start of the project to cover expenses such as conference calls.  Really an incredible achievement !

New FDO Provider for SpatiaLite

Haris Kurtagic of SL-King has just released a new FDO provider King.SpatiaLite for SpatiaLite.  SpatiaLite is an extension to SQLite to support spatial geometry and conforms to Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards.

Haris is an experienced FDO developer who has contributed FDO2FDO, for copying between FDO spatial data sources, as well as several FDO data providers including the King.Oracle open source Oracle provider, the King.Informix IBM Informix Dynamic Server provider and the King.KML provider for KML.

Jason Birch has already tried the new data provider with the SpatiaLite test database and reported on his experience in his blog.  The image shows data stored in SpatiaLIte displayed in AutoCAD Map 3D using the King.SpatiaLite FDO data provider.

Quantifying the Business Benefits of Open Geospatial Standards

One of the areas that researchers involved in the INSPIRE initiative are putting a lot of effort these days is quantifying the business benefits of an open spatial data infrastructure.  At the recent INSPIRE conference in Krakow  Max Craglia outlined the results of studies in the EU that attempted to quantify the economic benefits of sharing spatial data.  Seven years ago it was estimated that the benefits outweighed the costs by a factor of about 6 or 7.  Since then, some concrete data has begun to provide more reliable estimates.  One recent concrete quantified result was the reduction across the EU of the cost of environmental impact assessments (EIA) and strategic environmental assessments (SEA).  About 20 000 of these are undertaken each year.  They require about six months and cost about €75 000.  It has been estimated that 5% of the cost and 8-10% of the time required to prepare these assessments was devoted to finding the requisite data.  If as a result of INSPIRE, the data was readily available, then these costs would not be incurred and the result would be savings of €100 to €200 million across the EU.

A more concrete study was undertaken in Catalonia where an investment in standards-based spatial data infrastructure (SDI) of €1.5 million over the four year period 2002-2006, realized efficiency savings of 500 hours per month, equivalent to about €2.6 million for the entire period.  In addition local government in Catalonia estimated an effectiveness savings of 480 hours per month. An important wider social benefit was narrowing the digital gap between larger and smaller municipalities, which meant that as a result of INSPIRE, smaller municipalities were able to offer their residents services that had previously been only available in larger centres.

A second study was reported from Lombardia where an expenditure of about €4 million over the period 2006 to 2008 improved the efficiency of EIA and SEA production.  About 350 EIAs and SEAs are prepared every year in Lombardia at a total cost of about €25 million annually.  It was concluded that the regional SDI resulted in time savings of 11% and cost savings of 17%, which reduced the cost of preparing EIAs and SEAs by €3 million annually.

At the INSPIRE conference I bumped into Steven Ramage, the new Executive Director for Marketing and Communications at the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). During our conversation he pointed out that he is running a series of business value seminars at each of the OGC technical and planning committee meetings around the world with the objective of creating a business value working group. I think this is pretty cool because the technical aspects of geospatial interoperability are well understood and OGC standards like WMS, WFS, and GML have become industry standards for government around the world. It is the business benefits that we need to focus on because that will drive the adoption of geospatial standards in the private sector.

In June of this year, the OGC held a business seminar at the OGC Technical Committee (TC) Meeting in Silver Spring, Maryland, USA. The attendees at this seminar proposed that a Business Value Working Group be considered.  As a result, a charter has been drafted and is now available for comment by OGC members and non-members.

The idea is to develop a model that will quantify the inputs and outputs from participation in the OGC standards development process (cost of OGC membership, cost of OGC compliance, and so on), as well as identify and articulate the value of implementing OGC standards in market technologies and across communities of practice.  The primary objective is to quantify the business benefits of open geospatial standards. 

There will be another free seminar on the business value of geospatial standards at the OGC TC Meeting in Toulouse in late September.

GIO of the US Army on Geospatial Trends

DLT Solutions organized a Geospatial Tech Day June 8 in Washington, DC.  Mike Evanoff of Google Earth Enterprise gave the leadoff presentation.  Jim Flyzik moderated a panel on geospatial trends that included Mike Evanoff, myself, and Steve Miller of GeoEye.  Robert W. Burkhardt, the Army Geospatial Information Officer (GIO), was the keynote speaker.

Major themes

Robert Burkhardt focussed on four themes, ubiquitous high resolution spatial data, governance, geospatial standards, and the "big" enterprise. 

Ubiquitous high resolution data

In the past the lack of data was a problem, now the challenge is increasingly being able to integrate and analyze in order to extract information from the huge volumes of data that are now available.  Robert Burkhardt gave an example where web-based mapping helped expose patterns and extract actionable information from a huge, chaotic volume of data pouring out of many stovepipes. 

Data models, critical for sharing complex geospatial data, were also mentioned, specifically NFDD, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's (NGA) data model, which may become the DoD’s geospatial data model in the future, and AGDM, which is the Army’s geospatial data model. 

Steven Miller from GeoEye expects that in the future we will see increasing amounts of imagery from other than US sources.  Increasing competition will drive up resolution, drive down costs and increase national security risks.  He also expects that licensing models for data will change as more people demand access.

Data sharing

The Army GIO was unequivocal about the value proposition of sharing data, or what he called the “disciplined sharing of data”.  Sharing data saves lives and saves money. 

Open geospatial standards

Robert Burkhardt identified open geospatial standards as one the major advances enabling sharing geospatial data and mentioned OGC, FGDC, NFDD, and other standards.

Participation and crowdsourcing

Mike Evanoff talked a lot about participation because Google has recently introduced a crowdsourcing tools such as Map Maker which allows you to contribute data and customize your own maps.  Many people are familiar with the contribution that the OpenStreetMap project made in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti and Mike mentioned it.  But comprehensive street maps of Port-au-Prince were also produced, in just 72 hours, using Google Mapmaker. 

Convergence (of geospatial, engineering design, 3D visualization)

This was a major recurring theme that just about every speaker talked about.  It involves intelligent models such as BIM, which not only enable better design, but also sustainable design.  In the future convergence will help us to model and design entire sustainable cities.

3d visualization

This was a theme that Jim Flyzik, who has had over 20 years experience in government, really picked up on, the importance in government of visualization for communicating technical information to citizens.  In his summary of the panel discussion Jim highlighted what he thought were the three key takeaways, convergence, intelligent models, and especially visualization and how important visualization is for communicating to nontechnical people like politicians, bureaucrats and the man in the street.

Cloud computing

Mike Evanoff of Google talked about the advantages of cloud computing, and how Google does not consider itself a data vendor, but a vehicle for providing access to government and other data.  It is interesting that as a result of Google's crowdsourcing tools, Google Maps in North America now no longer relies on TeleAtlas or Navteq for their vector maps.

Importance of geospatial

It seems clear that the importance of geospatial within government will to continue to rise.  The Army appointed its first GIO in 2001 and Robert Burkhardt predicted that we will see more GIO’s in the federal government in the future.