The Geography Markup Language (GML) is the XML grammar defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to express geographical features. GML serves as a modeling language for geographic systems as well as an open interchange format for geographic transactions on the Internet. Key to GML's utility is its ability to integrate all forms of geographic information, including not only conventional "vector" or discrete objects, but coverages and sensor data.
The High-level architecture (HLA) is a standard for distributed simulation, used when building a simulation for a larger purpose by combining (federating) several simulations. The standard was developed in the 90’s under the leadership of the US Department of Defense and was later transitioned to become an open international IEEE standard. It is a recommended standard within NATO through STANAG 4603. Today the HLA is used in a number of domains including defense and security and civilian applications. The architecture specifies the following components.
In computing, GeoServer is an open-source server written in Java that allows users to share, process and edit geospatial data. Designed for interoperability, it publishes data from any major spatial data source using open standards. GeoServer has evolved to become an easy method of connecting existing information to virtual globes such as Google Earth and NASA World Wind as well as to web-based maps such as OpenLayers, Google Maps and Bing Maps. GeoServer functions as the reference implementation of the Open Geospatial Consortium Web Feature Service standard, and also implements the Web Map Service, Web Coverage Service and Web Processing Service specifications.
The concept of the "sensor web" is a type of sensor network that is especially well suited for environmental monitoring.
The phrase the "sensor web" is also associated with a sensing system which heavily utilizes the World Wide Web. OGC's Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) framework defines a suite of web service interfaces and communication protocols abstracting from the heterogeneity of sensor (network) communication.
Keyhole Markup Language (KML) is an XML notation for expressing geographic annotation and visualization within Internet-based, two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers. KML was developed for use with Google Earth, which was originally named Keyhole Earth Viewer. It was created by Keyhole, Inc, which was acquired by Google in 2004. KML became an international standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium in 2008. Google Earth was the first program able to view and graphically edit KML files. Other projects such as Marble have also started to develop KML support.
A Web Map Service (WMS) is a standard protocol developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium in 1999 for serving georeferenced map images over the Internet. These images are typically produced by a map server from data provided by a GIS database.
SensorML is an approved Open Geospatial Consortium standard. SensorML provides standard models and an XML encoding for describing sensors and measurement processes. SensorML can be used to describe a wide range of sensors, including both dynamic and stationary platforms and both in-situ and remote sensors.
A spatial database is a database that is optimized for storing and querying data that represents objects defined in a geometric space. Most spatial databases allow the representation of simple geometric objects such as points, lines and polygons. Some spatial databases handle more complex structures such as 3D objects, topological coverages, linear networks, and TINs. While typical databases have developed to manage various numeric and character types of data, such databases require additional functionality to process spatial data types efficiently, and developers have often added geometry or feature data types. The Open Geospatial Consortium developed the Simple Features specification and sets standards for adding spatial functionality to database systems. The SQL/MM Spatial ISO/EIC standard is a part the SQL/MM multimedia standard and extends the Simple Features standard with data types that support circular interpolations.
GeoSciML or Geoscience Markup Language is a GML Application Schema that can be used to transfer information about geology, with an emphasis on the "interpreted geology" that is conventionally portrayed on geologic maps. Its feature-type catalogue includes Geologic Unit, Mapped Feature, Earth Material, Geologic Structure, and specializations of these, as well as Borehole and other observational artefacts. It was created by, and is governed by, the Commission for the Management and Application of Geoscience Information (CGI) to support interoperability of information served from Geologic Surveys and other data custodians. It will be used in the OneGeology project, an effort to create a geological map of the entire Earth, served live by merging data from many national geological surveys.
The OGC Web Processing Service (WPS) Interface Standard provides rules for standardizing how inputs and outputs for invoking geospatial processing services, such as polygon overlay, as a web service. The WPS standard defines how a client can request the execution of a process, and how the output from the process is handled. It defines an interface that facilitates the publishing of geospatial processes and clients’ discovery of and binding to those processes. The data required by the WPS can be delivered across a network or they can be available at the server. WPS can describe any calculation including all of its inputs and outputs, and trigger its execution as a web service. WPS supports simultaneous exposure of processes via HTTP GET, HTTP POST, and SOAP, thus allowing the client to choose the most appropriate interface mechanism. The specific processes served up by a WPS implementation are defined by the owner of that implementation. Although WPS was designed to work with spatially referenced data, it can be used with any kind of data.
The Open Geospatial Consortium Web Coverage Service Interface Standard (WCS) defines Web-based retrieval of coverages – that is, digital geospatial information representing space/time-varying phenomena.
The Semantic Sensor Web (SSW) is a marriage of sensor and Semantic Web technologies. The encoding of sensor descriptions and
sensor observation data with Semantic Web languages enables more expressive representation, advanced access, and formal analysis of
sensor resources. The SSW annotates sensor data with spatial, temporal, and thematic semantic metadata. This technique builds on current standardization efforts within the Open Geospatial Consortium's Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) and extends them with Semantic Web technologies to provide enhanced descriptions and access to sensor data.
Geospatial PDF is a set of geospatial extensions to the Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.7 specification to include information that relates a region in the document page to a region in physical space — called georeferencing. A geospatial PDF can contain geometry such as points, lines, and polygons. These, for example, could represent building locations, road networks and city boundaries, respectively. The georeferencing metadata for geospatial PDF is most commonly encoded in one of two ways: the OGC best practice; and as Adobe's proposed geospatial extensions to ISO 32000. The specifications also allow geometry to have attributes, such as a name or identifying type.
GeoAPI is free software providing a set of Java interfaces for GIS applications. GeoAPI interfaces are derived from the abstract model and concrete specifications published collaboratively by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in its 19100 series of documents and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) in its abstract and implementation specifications. GeoAPI provides an interpretation and adaptation of these standards to match the constraints and usages of the target programming language.
The Web Coverage Processing Service (WCPS) defines a language for filtering and processing of multi-dimensional raster coverages, such as sensor, simulation, image, and statistics data. The Web Coverage Processing Service is maintained by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). This raster query language allows clients to obtain original coverage data, or derived information, in a platform-neutral manner over the Web.
A Web Map Tile Service (WMTS) is a standard protocol for serving pre-rendered or run-time computed georeferenced map tiles over the Internet. The specification was developed and first published by the Open Geospatial Consortium in 2010.
Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is a visual modeling and design tool based on the OMG UML. The platform supports: the design and construction of software systems; modeling business processes; and modeling industry based domains. It is used by businesses and organizations to not only model the architecture of their systems, but to process the implementation of these models across the full application development life-cycle.
A GeoPackage (GPKG) is an open, non-proprietary, platform-independent and standards-based data format for geographic information system implemented as a SQLite database container. Defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) with the backing of the US military and published in 2014, GeoPackage has seen wide widespread support from various government, commercial, and open source organizations.
SensorUp Inc. is an Internet of Things company based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. SensorUp led the development of the Open Geospatial Consortium SensorThings API standard specification, an open and unified geospatial framework to interconnect IoT sensing devices, data, and applications over the Web. In 2014, SensorUp received funding supports from Natural Resources Canada's GeoConnections and TecTerra. In 2016, as part of the OGC Internet of Things pilot project SensorUp demonstrated its interoperable OGC SensorThings API platform solution at the Department of Homeland Security. Dr. Reginald Brothers, the Undersecretary of the Homeland Security Science and Technology, was "impressed with the ‘state of the practical’ where these various industry sensors can be integrated today using open standards that remove the stovepipe limitations of one-off technologies. " In March 2016 SensorUp submitted a new open source software project proposal, titled Whiskers, to the Eclipse Foundation. Whiskers will be an open source Javascript client library for the OGC SensorThings API and a light-weight OGC SensorThings API server for IoT gateways.
