OpenGIS Consortium Technical & Management Committees
Vienna, Austria 4-8 October 1998

Mission Report

0. Distribution List

1. Subject

One of the regular 2-monthly meetings of the technical committee, subcommittees and working groups. This most recent OGC bimonthly meetings were hosted Oracle New England Research Laboratories, a Principal Member of OGC.

2. Participants

About 110 attendees representing 49 organizations and 12 countries were present.

From JRC: Sargent (SAI). Attending as mission sans frais with a separate subsidy for travelling attendance supplied by GIPSIE (since the Space Applications Institute mission budget suffered catatrophic collapse just as this mission was being approved).

3. Aim of the Meeting

Continuation of technical work devising and agreeing interface standards within the remit of the OGC. The results are 'RFPs', Requests For Proposals and adopted specifications.

4. Central Results of the Meeting

I was confirmed as chairman of the Feature Identity and Relationships Working Group (I was not present at the last TC). The results of the meeting and on-going work are fully documented on the OGC Feature Identity and Relationships WG website (email me if you cannot get access to this)

5. Report of the Meeting

The OpenGIS Consortium (OGC) convenes its technical committee six times a year. The last half-day overlaps with the OGC Management Committee meeting that then takes another day after the Technical Committee finishes. I attended all four days of the Technical Committee and all of the Management Committee (by invitation).

Full reports and current technical papers, attendee lists and policy statements can be found on: http://www.opengis.org/

The technical committee meets together only for scheduling, conclusion/reporting and new generic "technology awareness" presentations. Most of the time is spent in smaller meetings of Special Interest Groups (SIGs), Working Groups (WGs) or ad hoc groups of three or four people and one Task Force (TF). The ad hoc groups are generally where the innovative thinking is done.

The following groups met, some several times:

Meetings Calendar 1998

 
5-9 October Vienna, Austria GIPSIE and TU Vienna
7-11 December  Mountain View (CA) USA  Sun Microsystems

There is a OGC meetings and events schedule website.

How the OGC works

The Technical Committee exists to issue RFP (Requests for Proposals) documents. These identify a small, achievable need and request companies to propose a detailed software specification. To help set a context for this work, the TC continually edits a set of documents called "The Abstract Specification".

These RFPs, which are posted on OGC's public web site (http://www.opengis.org), request the submission of proposed detailed engineering implementation specifications for software interfaces which implement recently completed parts of OGC's OpenGIS Abstract Specification. These implementation specifications typically are written by ad hoc consortia of commercial GIS vendor companies. Out of those proposed, the TC will approve and adopt at most one.

Interfaces that conform to OpenGIS Implementation Specifications resulting from such implementation submissions will enable diverse geoprocessing software systems to communicate directly, which will enable complex geospatial information to become an integral part of modern network-based information systems.

RFPs usually ask for implementation specifications that will enable developers to build interfaces for software running on any of the common distributed computing platforms (DCPs), such as SQL, Java RMI, Microsoft's COM and OMG's CORBA. Different DCPs require different specifications, but OGC is designing the specifications to provide as much interoperability between DCPs as possible.

Formal documentation of the OGC Technical Committee procedures can be found on http://www.opengis.org/techno/development.htm.
 
 

Philip Sargent
TP 262
Centro Comune di Ricerca
I-21020 Ispra (VA)
Italia

Philip.Sargent@computer.org