Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) published a video demonstration of OGC Web Services. This video was produced in part of the OGC Interoperability Program (IP). IP is a global, hands-on and collaborative prototyping program for rapid development of proven candidate specifications for consideration for consensus adoption and public release by the OGC Specification Program.

In the video demonstration, the use of advanced OGC technology is covered. This includes Sensor Web Enablement (SWE), Geo Processing Workflow (GPW), Geo-Decision Support (GeoDSS), Geo-Digital Rights Management (GeoDRM), CAD/GIS/BIM (CGB), OGC Location Services (OpenLS) and Compliance Testing (CITE).

See the video demo page.

Jeff Thurston at Vector One writes,

“I think interoperability is not THE issue. The issue in the GIS and geospatial arena is structural barriers internal to enterprises. It is all about breaking the barriers between people.

We need to get back to the basics, discussing what it is we want to do with the many high quality tools we have created across this industry and how they can really be used - and - changing the structural processes in organizations to make it happen.”

I think interoperability is a problem, at least from the knowledge integration point of view. Organizations have invested a lot of time and money to collect information. Different information collected over the years often is not stored in the same representation format.

Though his suggestion makes great sense, I doubt that it’s the most cost-effective solution. It’s not always economical to reconsolidate datastores just because we want different schemas to align and use shared vocabularies. NGA people told me once, “reconsolidation is expensive”.

I believe semantic interoperability is a better solution.

The Fourth Semantic Interoperability for E-Government Conference was held today at the MITRE Corporation (McLean, VA). The purpose of this conference is to bring together semantic interoperability practitioners to discuss and showcase technologies that can help government agencies to improve information sharing, knowledge management and interoperability. The conference expects about 250 attendees from different government agencies, universities and industries.

Colleagues and I represented Image Matters LLC to showcase the company’s new product called KnowledgeSmarts. We had an exhibition booth set up during the networking lunch session. It was fun meeting people from different backgrounds who share a common interest in semantic technology.

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