The OGC and Semantics
Carl Reed, PHD
OGC
November 18, 2008
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Agenda
• "The man who insists on seeing with perfect
clearness before he decides, never decides."
– Henri-Frédéric Amiel
• The real crux of dealing with semantics in the geo context!
Copyright © 2008, Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc., All
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Helping the World to Communicate
Geographically
Without vocabularies, we cannot communicate
• And forget “real” content interoperability
• For the first 3 years of OGC existence, focus was on the
Abstract Model, semantics, and vocabularies
– What is a coordinate?
– What is a Point?
– What is a feature?
– And ad-naseum
Copyright © 2008, Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc., All
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Helping the World to Communicate
Geographically
And yet
• The OGC has not generally focused on geosemantics and
interoperability other than a few targeted projects
– Geosemantics Interoperability Experiment
– Geosemantics Domain Working Group
• But many member organizations are dealing with
semantics and geosemantics
Copyright © 2008, Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc., All
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Helping the World to Communicate
Geographically
A process that seems to work
• Vitally necessary for domain community information
experts to collaborate and define volcabular(ies) and
information models!
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Helping the World to Communicate
Geographically
And then
• Encode the information model in a community accessible,
consenus approved encoding
• Such as CityGML and GeoSciML
Copyright © 2008, Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc., All
Rights Reserved.
Helping the World to Communicate
Geographically
Case 1
• This collaboration can happen
external to the OGC and then the
work brought into the OGC
• The proposed Hydrology work is
an example of this use case
Copyright © 2008, Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc., All
Rights Reserved.
Helping the World to Communicate
Geographically
Case 2
• This collaboration can happen external to the OGC and
stay external to the OGC and approved as a standard in
that domain’s appropriate accreditation body.
• GeoSciML
Copyright © 2008, Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc., All
Rights Reserved.
Helping the World to Communicate
Geographically
Case 3
• Official collaboration between an information community
and the OGC
• TDWG and MMI
Copyright © 2008, Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc., All
Rights Reserved.
Helping the World to Communicate
Geographically
Questions?
Dr. Carl Reed
OGC CTO, Chair OGC Consensus
Process
[email protected]
+1 970 402-0284
www.myogc.org
Copyright © 2008, Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc., All
Rights Reserved.
Helping the World to Communicate
Geographically