Between the Poles: An open source perspective on the Open Geospatial Consortium standards process

Geoff Zeiss

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July 2023

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Lidar News
Gene Roe's laser scanning industry news
Open Source Geospatial Foundation OSGEO
OSGeo was created to support the collaborative development of open source geospatial software and promote its widespread use
Proven guidelines for reducing underground infrastructure damage at airports, university, industrial, and commercial campuses, and towns
There are proven measures that an administration, owner, or municipal government responsible for an airport, university, industrial or commercial campus, or town can undertake to reduce the risk of underground utility damage, the associated disruptions to operations and business and the danger for workers and the public.
Sharing information about the location of underground utilities
The U.S. devotes an estimated $10 billion annually to locating underground infrastructure. Every construction project requiring excavation involves significant efforts in locating underground utilities prior to and during construction to reduce the risk of injuries and unexpected project delays. But this information is rarely shared and the location of underground infrastructure is recaptured over and over again. There are successful examples around the world where municipal and regional governments have helped enable a shared underground utility network database.
Growing evidence of the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach to construction
Building information modeling (BIM) has been applied to design-build construction projects for many years. A growing number of countries are mandating BIM for public projects. While the UK government has said that "...we know that the largest prize for BIM lies in the operational stages of the project life-cycle", until recently there has not been hard data to support this conjecture. Similarly there has been only anecdotal support for an integrated BIM and geospatial approach for design, build, operate and maintain projects. Now we are beginning to see data from real world projects that offer evidence for the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach for construction projects.
Progress in geospatial, civil, and BIM interoperability promises efficient workflows for infrastructure
The BIM and geospatial interoperability challenge is the latest symptom of the broader problem of integrating AEC and geospatial workflows, that has contributed to low productivity in the construction sector. After the announcement about a year ago by Jack Dangermond and Andrew Anagnost of a new relationship to build a bridge between Autodesk and ESRI technologies, I thought it a good time to review progress toward interoperability between the AEC and geospatial worlds.
Geography2050: Accurate location information about underground infrastructure is essential for powering our future planet
I thought it would be worth while to include here a talk I gave at GEOGRAPHY 2050 Powering Our Future Planet at Columbia University in New York about the importance of accurate location information about underground infrastructure for the future development of the energy grid. With some notable exceptions accurately recording the location of subsurface infrastructure including oil, gas, electric power and other energy infrastructure is ignored - perhaps this is a case of out-of-sight is indeed out-of-mind. The reality is that knowing the location of underground energy infrastructure is critical for national security, for disaster planning and management, for public safety and for economic efficiency. Everyone is aware of at least one disaster resulting from or exacerbated by not knowing where our energy infrastructure is - the explosions in San Bruno in California (2010) and Belgium (2004) immediately come to mind.
Deep learning enables automated extraction of building footprints and road networks from satellite imagery
Automated feature extraction from satellite imagery has made major progress in the last year. Accurate building footprints extracted from high resolution satellite imagery are becoming available from companies such as Ecopia, which has just announced a partnership with DigitalGlobe, whose satellites are capable of 30 cm (approximately one foot) resolution. Also NVIDIA has demonstrated the ability to automate detection of many road networks using sophisticated algorithms and multi-spectral high resolution imagery.
BIM + geospatial interoperability would avoid another CAD + GIS quagmire
A specific challenge currently facing the AEC and geospatial industries is integrating building information models (BIM) and geospatial infrastructure and building models. There are parallels between what happened in the 1990s in unsuccessfully addressing CAD+GIS interoperability and the current challenge of BIM+geospatial interoperability. But there are also important differences which provide grounds for optimism that the availability of both BIM and geospatial standards, a vibrant open source geospatial community, and a new willingness on the part of major software players in the BIM and geospatial industries will make it possible to successfully address the latest interoperability challenge facing the AEC (architecture, engineering and construction) and geospatial industries.
BVLOS drones improve power line inspections amid increasing fire and storm risks for utilities | Utility Dive
Transmission line inspections for vegetation management and other purposes are essential in ensuring grid reliability and resilience. We saw the devastating effect of vegetation encroachment in the recent California fires, which in part have been blamed on failure to maintain properly cleared transmission lines. With drones that can cover great distances in a single flight and provide detailed and accurate aerial imagery of transmission lines and other infrastructure, it is now possible to almost completely automate this expensive process. Automating transmission line inspections for vegetation management using BVLOS drones not only saves money, but also could improve the resiliency and reliability of the transmission grid.

« 15 top U.S. states for smart grid policy, customer engagement, and technology including GIS | Main | Economic impact of weather-related power outages estimated at $18 billion to $33 billion annually »

August 14, 2013

An open source perspective on the Open Geospatial Consortium standards process

I blogged previously about the OGC GeoPackage specification being available for public comment. Chris Holmes of OpenGeo, who has been a major contributor to the open source geospatial community since joining the GeoServer team as lead developer in 2002, has posted an illuminating blog post about his experience in working with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards specification process on the GeoPackage specification.

Back in February Chris was unhappy with the GeopPackage specification as it then was. So much so that he decided to join the GeoPackage Standards Working Group (SWG), "participating in weekly (and then twice a week) calls, and trying to work with the OGC workflow of wikis and massive Word documents." One of his goals was to learn about how the OGC process actually works and be able to "offer some suggestions for improvement from my open source software experience."

This is very important from an OGC perspective for two reasons. First of all, open source geospatial is an important and growing segment of the geospatial software community, and secondly "open source loves standards" so that historically often the first implementations of a standard and the first adopters have come from the open source community.

In his blog post Chris reported that the OGC staff has been "great" about being open to new ways of working. In particular he was very excited that the SWG had achieved an OGC first by putting the GeoPackage specification out on GitHub, which is expected to make it much more accessible to the open source community than if it had been made available in the traditional OGC way (wikis and Word docs).

Secondly he is happy with the specification that the OGC standards process has generated. In his own words he believes that the specification is ‘pretty good’ as it is right now, but that he expects that the GeoPackage specification will improve as a result of real implementations. He says he would like to see three full implementations before the GeoPackage V 1.0 standard is fully adopted by the OGC.

For the OGC putting the specification on GitHub is an experiment, so Chris has asked the community, especially the open source folks familiar with working with GitHub, to become involved in helping to improve the specification. For folks without GitHub experience the SWG has written some tips on how to contribute to the GeoPackage specification without having to learn git.

In summary this, because it comes from an open source geopatial perspective, sounds very positive. I think it bodes well for more direct involvement of the open source geospatial community in OGC standards specification processes in the future. This would be a win-win for the OGC and the open source geospatial community.

Between the Poles

Geoff Zeiss

July 2023

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August 14, 2013

An open source perspective on the Open Geospatial Consortium standards process

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