The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced the creation of the Geospatial Incubator Group on July 5th. The group will address "issues of location and geographical properties of resources for the Web of today and tomorrow."

Yours truly penned an article for GeoInformatics to highlight the differences and synergies between open source and open standards. read more | Adena Schutzberg's blog | add new comment

WMS Javascript Library is, per the website, a tool "to facilitate the creation of dynamics maps using freely available WMS servers." Further:

The WMS Javascript Library provides an API to allow the creation of dynamic maps including simple zoom functionality, clickable googlemap-like overlays, and GetFeatureInfo queries by clicking the map (coming soon).
See the examples for details.

I'm not a programmer, but this looks really easy to use.

OGC gave a formal presentation at this year's Where 2.0, but its work showed up elsewhere, according to bloggers who covered the event.

Coverage of OSGeo from Wired notes a demo of WMS and WFS.

They [Brent Owens and Arnulf Benno Christi of Mapbender fame] walked through the process of simple map creation using the WMS and WFS protocols defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium. Through GetMap and GetFeature requests, users can retrieve vector-based map data, add or delete elements, and then output the results. The maps can be outputted as GIF or JPG for display in a browser, a PDF or SVG for publication, and as KML (Keyhole Markup Language) for insertion into Google Earth.

by Adena Schutzberg Consultant to OGC

A City like Any Other

The City of San Mateo, California is like many others when it comes to GIS. It stores its data in a relational database: SQL Server. It uses high end tools for editing, mapping and analysis: GeoMedia from Intergraph. It publishes its maps on the Web using a tool for that purpose: GeoMedia Web Map. And, like other cities, and many citizens of the world, it's enamored with Google Earth.

The confusion abounds in the marketplace about the distinction between "open source" and "open standards." GeoWorld offers a primer by OGC's Sam Bacharach that should help alleviate some of the mix ups.

Amit Shah, a Project Manager at IndiaNIC Infotec offers up a nice introductory article on "GIS and Spatial Extensions with MySQL" in his blog. He concludes:

In the current implementation of spatial extensions in MySQL, parts of the OpenGIS Simple Features have been left out. Among these are:

Functions - Some functions are missing, among them some that deal with creating new spatial data values from existing ones, such as Union() (not to be confused with the SQL UNION operator) and Intersection() (not to be confused with the Intersect() spatial function).

The LADS blog notes a recently published book by Krzysztof Kolodziej and Johan Hjelm titled Local Positioning Systems: LBS Applications and Services. Kris did some work at OGC in the past few years and I met up with him at the Location Intelligence Conference in April.

OGC President Mark Reichardt wrote the preface, which includes this paragraph:

By Rob Woodcock
SEE Grid Community Director & Computational Services Architect
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation

Australia has a relatively mature minerals exploration environment, with large amounts of geological data distributed between the Australian Government, various state governments, research organisations and industry. The primary users of these data are in the global mineral exploration industry. Other users are focussed on various planning and environmental activities. The Solid Earth and Environment Grid (SEEGrid) community recognises that poor data interoperability is a major barrier to the effective use of these existing data. Data interchange standards are limited or absent, and the fragmented nature of the mining software market adds to the problem. The objective of the SEEGrid community is to foster the development of open information standards in the earth and environment domain. To demonstrate the real advantages of easy data interchange, a testbed for real-time interoperability between data housed in the geological surveys of the various states and territories in Australia has been undertaken. The initial project involved three jurisdictions sharing a border in central Australia. The primary technical collaborators are the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Geoscience Australia (GA), Social Change Online (SCO) and Fractal Technologies (FT), as well as each of the participating surveys.

The 9th AGILE International Conference on Geographic Information Science titled “Shaping the Future of Geographic Information Science in Europe” was held April 20-22, 2006 in Visegrád, Hungary. The organizers already have the papers on the website in PDF and several touch on OGC-related topics.

The whole list is available, but these stood out in a quick review:

Special interest SDIs to support business processes - standards in precision agriculture

Are Geospatial Catalogues Reaching their Goals? - how to make catalogues more useful