Guest Blog - "OGC’s Mobile Internet Standards Initiative"

By Steven Ramage
 
Location apps are hot, but the market is fragmented. One reason is that there’s no standard way to seamlessly integrate location and building information. Developers and providers of 3d building data and content need a standard, integrated way to encode indoor location and outdoor location and to invoke services that use that location data.

If such a foundation were in place to support multiple positioning technologies and technologies like augmented reality, sensor webs and a wiki of places, we would see more market growth and more diverse and useful applications. The progress would be apparent not only in wayfinding, marketing and games, but also in emergency and disaster response, security, facilities planning and management, real estate finance, insurance, the smart grid, education, energy management, and management of air, water, gas, sewerage and air quality.

If we had standards and agreement in the market to use these standards, components would become easier to integrate into new and existing applications. Developers of platforms, tools, data and apps would reach larger markets, and we would see unanticipated new applications. This is what tends to happen with extensive, open networks. We have only one Earth, but often information about the Earth’s natural and built features and phenomena is locked in stovepipes.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is a dedicated, global forum for spatial standards discussions and spatial standards development. The OGC’s process for standards development and promotion involves industry alliances with organizations that are working various aspects of the indoor/outdoor location problem, such as IEC/ISO, IETF (GeoPriv), W3C (Geolocation and Point of Interest), Web3D, ETSI, Kronos, OSCRE and OMA. NAVTEQ is a member of the OGC.

In the OGC, recent activity involves application-specific and trimmed-down profiles of standards and also new standards that are being developed for lightweight location encodings. Many of these use lightweight profiles of the OGC Geography Markup Language (GML), such as the GML profile of GeoRSS. GML is written into the NIST Framework and Roadmap for Smart Grid Interoperability Standards and is used widely in other domains. Most OGC standards involve Web service interfaces, but our members are now actively exploring “RESTful” standards-based approaches to location problems.

Driven by OGC member interest and obvious market need, the OGC has begun a multi-faceted Mobile Internet Standards Initiative that encourages public participation:

·         A major OGC-organized workshop, Expanding GeoWeb to an Internet of Things, will be held at COM.Geo, Washington, DC, 23-25 May 2011. There will be presentations from NAVTEQ and also CISCO, SwiftRiver/Ushahidi, the US Federal Communications Commission, BBN, Quova, Skyhook, MobileGIS, Autodesk, Microsoft, the Hasso-Plattner-Institut, 1Spatial, NGC, Telcordia Applied Research, the GeoWeb Forum and others.

·         The Third International AR (Augmented Reality) Standards Meeting, June 15 and 16, 2011, will be held in conjunction with the OGC Technical Committee meetings in Taiwan.

·         The OGC has launched a 3D Portrayal Interoperability Experiment (IE) to advance best practice for implementing standards for publishing and streaming 3D geospatial assets related to urban planning and landscape visualization. CityGML, an OGC encoding standard for the representation, storage and exchange of virtual 3D city and landscape models, is now supported by many CAD and building information model (BIM) vendors and is being rapidly adopted by users.

·         During the Mobile World Congress in February 2011, the OGC met with companies interested in developing a testbed to advance standards for spatial information and embedded mobile. The OGC’s Embedded Mobile Ecosystem Testbed Concept Development activity is in the planning stage, and the OGC will soon announce a two day sponsors workshop. Those interested in learning more can contact George Percivall, OGC Chief Architect (gpercivall at opengeospatial.org)

·         The OGC has published a position paper: Increasing Market Opportunities for Augmented Reality Through Collaborative Development of Open Standards.

·         An OGC discussion paper, "Requirements and Space-Event Modeling for Indoor Navigation", presents a technical model for indoor navigation that simultaneously addresses route planning, multiple localization methods, navigation contexts, and different locomotion types. (Please comment!)

From an information and applications perspective, different domains or communities of interest view the world differently. Though these stakeholders’ requirement sets are different, they overlap, and therein lies the basis of the solution to their interoperability problems.

The OGC Interoperability Program runs rapid prototyping activities – including testbeds, interoperability experiments, plug-fests and pilot projects – to fast-track the introduction of specific industry requirements into the formal standards development process. Sponsors set the goals based on real-world use cases. Participants work to meet those goals. The initiatives feed into OGC Technical Committee working groups focused on topics, such as 3D urban models, workflow, security, disaster management and semantics. Developers of external standards can submit their standards for review and possible adoption as official OGC standards, so that they can be maintained, evolved and harmonized in a fair and open process.

The standards process works best when many people and organizations participate. There’s a wide spectrum of participation: major organizations may pool their requirements and funds to sponsor testbeds. Individuals may participate as developers or simply offer occasional comments. Participation is not only about cooperating to build a firm foundation that helps shape a better future. It’s also about learning, sharing knowledge and know-how, building a network of contacts and discovering business opportunities in an industry that’s moving at light speed.

Steven Ramage Executive Director

Marketing & Communications

Open Geospatial Consortium

Bergen, Norway

+47-9862-6865          

sramage@opengeospatial.org

Twitter: @ogc_steven