Successful OGC interoperability Day in Barcelona

In conjunction with the meeting of the OGC Technical Committee in Barcelona from 9 to 13 March, an OGC Interoperability Day was held on Friday 13 March 2015, at Institut Cartogràfic i Geologic de Catalunya (ICGC). This event was organized by the Iberian and Latin-American Forum of the OGC (ILAF) and the Associació Catalana de Tecnologies de la Informació Geospacial (ACTIG) and sponsored by ICGC and CREAF.

The session was opened by the Director of the Institut Cartogràfic i Geologic de Catalunya, Mr. Jaume Miranda and the Director of European Services, Ms Athina Trakas. After them, Mr Luis Bermudez, Executive Director of the OGC’s Compliance and e-learning Program talked about the benefits of the OGC compliance program: being able to tenders that require standardization and the possibility to make visible the compliance label in giveaway materials and website. He also talked about the implementation of open standards for Smart Cities emphasising in CityGML, the Sensor Web Enablement family of standards for the Internet of Things, the Augmented Reality Markup Language and GeoSPARQL for linked data. Next lecture was given by Mr Clemens Portele (Interactive Instruments) focused on the opportunities and challenges of using JSON.

 The conference was moderated by Dr Joan Masó, researcher of CREAF and co-chair the ILAF forum.

Clemens emphasized the idea that JSON is simpler than XML (no namespace, no linking mechanism, no validation schema, etc) and need to be reserved for simpler situations probably in combination with REST APIs. After him, Mr Victor Pascual (ICGC) presented an implementation of GeoJSON in InstaMaps application. The following talk was about a GeoJSON implementation in mobile devices deliberated by Mr. Gonzalo López and Mr. Pablo Martínez from the Spatial Data Infraestructure Government of La Rioja. Both independent presentations showed GitHub as a GeoJSON repository that provides versioning and their applications accessing GitHub directly. Later, Ms Dolors Barrot (ICGC) talked about progress on metadata standards implementation for data and services. Dolors concentrated her presentation on the problems observed in implementing ISO19115: the lack of metadata completeness, the need for metadata visual summaries (such as the GEO Label) and some problems intrinsic in the standard. Mr Ted Habermann (The HFD Group) explained the additions in the new metadata standard 19115-1 in terms of better citations, metadata and data identifiers, usage reports and responsible party. Next, Mrs Ana García (Spatial Data Infraestructure Government of La Rioja) presented one of the first Spanish implementations of Geopackage for the Harmonised Topographic Base (BTA).

In the session was well attended and an interesting discussion took place showing the high level of knowledge of local attendees being able to make contributions based on their professional experiences.

Next lecture was given by Ms Marie-Francoise Voidrot (Meteo France) who explained the use of standards in the meteorology as a tool to open meteorological information to other domains. Finally, the last two presentations were related with hydrology standards, Mr Antonio Moya (INCLAM group) presented an implementation of WaterML standard as a way to increase interoperability in the water domain (and showing a different situation in comparison to the previous presentation; while meteorology had their own standards and internal procedures, the water sector seems more fragmented and with more internal data sharing problems). Gabriel Anzaldi (Barcelona Digital centre technology) talked about an interoperability pilot project called WatERP; a project that looks for a 8% save in water resources and money only by implementing proper standards and communication procedures in  river basins.

During the session, the President of OGC Mr. Mark Reichardt recognised the long trajectory of Mr. Jordi Guimet in the field of interoperability and his work and dedication as director of the Support Center of the Spatial Data Infrastructure of Catalonia from its beginning of activities till his recent retirement.