In this issue of OGC User we look at three very different applications of OGC standards:

• Spain's IDEE GeoNetwork is a wonderful case study showing the value of OpenGIS Specifications in building a modern national spatial data infrastructure. Spain is implementing a national model of what INSPIRE will be for Europe.
• GOMOOS shows what a boon OGC-enabled interoperability has become for the oceanographic research community. Researchers in other domains will surely look at this and see that deploying OGC standards ought to be taught as best practices in their disciplines.
• SensorNet represents a major boost for OGC's Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) effort. This US-funded Oak Ridge National Laboratory project is providing SWE technical input, standards harmonization and incentives for vendor adoption and user deployment of these extraordinarily consequential standards.

These are all new deployments of OpenGIS Specifications (and in the case of SWE, specification prototypes). But they are not experiments. The way forward is clear. There is a clear need for a single, open interoperability framework for geoprocessing, and that is what OGC provides.

Maryann Karinch
www.karinch.com

The tsunami of December 26, 2004 drew worldwide attention to the ocean's shocking power to affect the lives of coastal dwellers. Only months before, damage from hurricanes raging through the southern U.S. took thousands by surprise, even after authorities issued alerts about their paths and potential effects. Could ocean science have offered more specific warnings to the people of Southeast Asia and Florida?

Michael Gould
Lenguajes y Sistemas Informaticos / Information Systems Department
Universitat Jaume I
E-12080 Castellón (Spain)
email: gould@lsi.uji.es

Spain's Spatial Data Infrastructure portal, "IDEE" (in English), offers this quote from "El hacedor," a collection of prose pieces, parables, and poems by the Argentinian writer J. L. Borges:

Author: Frank DeNap, Manager
SensorNet Program
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
P.O. Box 2008
Oak Ridge, TN 37831
email: denapfa@ornl.gov

The National Center for Sensor Systems Interoperability (NCSSI) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), along with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), other federal laboratories, universities and private sector partners, is designing and developing SensorNet. SensorNet is a vendor-neutral, evolutionary interoperability framework for web-based discovery, access, control, integration, analysis, exploitation and visualization of multiple online sensors, transducers, sensor-derived data repositories, and sensor-related processing capabilities. The purpose of SensorNet is to provide a comprehensive nationwide system for real-time detection, identification, and assessment of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive hazards. It provides distributed access with multi-level security, information fusion, and common operational picture.