Written by Bart De Lathouwer, Director, Interoperability Programs, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
On March 10, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) Secretariat published a Call for Participation in Phase 7 (year 7) of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) Architecture Implementation Pilot (AIP-7). The AIP-7 kickoff is tentatively scheduled for May 1st in the afternoon (CET) at the GEO Work Plan Symposium in Geneva, with remote participation via GoToMeeting.
At the OGC Technical Committee Meeting in Crystal City, Virginia, there was an ad-hoc AIP-7 gathering. The agenda for the gathering (before responses are due on April 4th) was to discuss the various scenarios described in the Call for Participation and participants' planned technology contributions and possibilities for teaming.
The AIP is an open and collaborative process to develop and pilot new process and infrastructure components for the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI). The GCI enables users of Earth observations to discover, assess, access, search and use the vast and diverse international stores of data, information, tools and services available through the GEOSS.
The primary outcome of the 2014 GEOSS Architecture Implementation Pilot (AIP-7) will be the creation and deployment of several modern, lightweight, Web or mobile applications (“apps”) that are fed by multiple registered standards-based data and processing services. Each app will be designed to address a specific user-driven problem. For the purpose of this Call for Participation (CFP), we will call these “key apps.” These key apps will: promote the benefit of having standard services registered with GEOSS; be championed by field users; and ideally stimulate interest in providing more data to GEOSS. In addition, these key apps will provide a real-world test of operational protocol and format standards that may provide useful information for standards revision, adoption and documentation. Piloting key apps is a new concept for the AIP in this 7th edition, and represents a shift in focus to the use of GEOSS datasets rather than the registration of new datasets.
The components of the CFP include the following: Develop and deploy easy-to-use online (Web and Mobile) apps that demonstrate the value of standards-based access to EO data and services registered with GEOSS.
Target areas include:
- Flood and drought Monitoring, Food security and Energy management
- Environmental monitoring using Mobile Sensors, Citizen Observatories, Crowd Sourcing
- Wind and Solar Energy Potential Estimator
- Earth cover change detection
- Ocean observations and commercial fisheries
Activities to support the key apps
- Deploy and integrate standard technologies to facilitate data access, including user authentication, geoprocessing workflows
- Mobile and Web app development frameworks
- User authentication
- Geoprocessing workflows
Soon the OGC will announce a set of extensions to the OGC Web Coverage. Service Interface Standard and also extensions to the (non-OGC) OpenSearch standard that significantly expand the capabilities of service-oriented data access and interprocess communication.
For more information, please contact me at bdelathouwer [at] opengeospatial.org.