Open Geospatial Consortium Specifications Research Articles

THE SPATIAL DATA INFRASTRUCTURE OF AN URBAN DIGITAL TWIN IN THE BUILDING ENERGY DOMAIN USING OGC STANDARDS

Abstract. As the world has more urbanized, cities need to assess and manage their building energy performances in order to achieve energy-reduction goals. The urban digital twins (UDT) offer promising solutions to this demand by providing valuable insights with qualitative and quantitative information about the building environment. The urban building energy data is not only measured from the equipped sensor devices but can also be simulated based on the analysis software. In this research, we aim to explore the development of the spatial data infrastructure (SDI) for managing building energy in the UDT application by employing the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards which increases the data usability and efficiency. In our concept SDI, the big data in the UDT application is managed with the OGC specifications as follows: OGC SensorThings API (STA) for data with Spatio-temporal characteristics, OGC API 3D GeoVolumes for 3D geospatial content delivery, OGC CityGML for virtual 3D city models, OGC API Features, Web Feature Service (WFS), and Web Map Service (WMS) for other 2D geospatial contents. This concept enables broad interoperability between multiple data layers and client applications. As a proof of concept, we developed the UDT application called with a highly visual and intuitive user interface using the proposed SDI concept as a part of the EnSysLE project in the study area of three regions in Germany: Ludwigsburg, Dithmarschen, and Ilm-Kreis. The proposed concept can be expanded to other UDT domains and on a larger scale in future work.

Bibliometric Analysis of OGC Specifications between 1994 and 2020 Based on Web of Science (WoS)

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international non-profit standards organization. Established in 1994, OGC aims to make geospatial information and services FAIR-Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. OGC specifications have greatly facilitated interoperability among software, hardware, data, and users in the GIS field. This study collected publications related to OGC specifications from the Web of Science (WoS database) between 1994 to 2020 and conducted a literature analysis using Derwent Data Analyzer and VosViewer, finding that OGC specifications have been widely applied in academic fields. The most productive organizations were Wuhan University and George Mason University; the most common keywords were interoperability, data, and web service. Since 2018, the emerging keywords that have attracted much attention from researchers were 3D city models, 3D modeling, and smart cities. To make geospatial data FAIR, the OGC specifications SWE and WMS served more for “Findable”, SWE contributed more to “Accessible”, WPS and WCS served more for “Interoperable”, and WPS, XML schemas, WFS, and WMS served more for “Reusable”. The OGC specification also serves data and web services for large-scale infrastructure such as the Digital Earth Platform of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

PORTABILITY OF CARTOGRAPHIC SYMBOLS LIBRARY FOR OPEN STANDARDS

Abstract. The Geological Survey of Brazil has a library of palaeontology symbols to use in geological mapping works, currently in bitmap format and adapted for ESRI platform. This type of representation has presented anti-aliasing problems when reduced, in addition to not being suitable for map presentation on the web, according to OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) specifications. This work presents a reproducible method in any symbol library type. The method consists of converting the symbol library to open-source format, resulting an OpenType font file, which can be installed on any operating system and view each symbol font in any software that has this functionality, such as a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software. The need to develop font construction technique is due to improving typographic quality of cartographic representations and making library compatible with main GIS softwares. Those 61 pictorial palaeontology symbols were converted, one by one, to SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format. We imported each symbol as a glyph in FontForge font editor. Major computer platforms use OpenType format due to its wide availability and typographic flexibility, including provisions to deal with diverse characteristics of internationally symbolic alphabet systems. There is even the possibility of symbols standardizing in the UTF-8 alphabet system, an issue for the scientific community to study. The advantage of using the SVG format is its size, a compact text file, and has an excellent compression factor. In addition, version-control repositories, like GitHub, can store SVG files, which would facilitate content management. The adopted method proved to be applicable to any cartographic symbols library with good results. Rendering tests on different platforms (web or desktop) showed no noticeable differences. One of the most important aspects of the method presented in this work was to make cartographic symbols library public and open-source for use by the geoscientific community, regardless whether an open-source or proprietary platform is used, and so, the Geological Survey of Brazil will be able to distribute geological symbology patterns, according to Open Data definition.

Geo-visualization of antibiotic resistance based on web map service

Abstract. An antibiotic resistance is a serious problem on health and humanity. Our human society needs to understand the threat of antibiotic resistance. To geo-visualize the location, biotic information and spatial pattern of antibiotic resistance matters is an effective way for intuitive findings. We focused on the antibiotic resistance issue of Han-river in South Korea and analyzed their spread, as well as range of influence.We developed the geo-database of antibiotic resistance matters and represented spatial information based on WMS (Web Map Service) which is adjusted to OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) specifications. We designed correlated data schema structure of antibiotic matters, degrees of resistance, water quality and location of the sampled points on the river. Our WMS system followed the open source architecture and Q-GIS to make geo-server. This system was organized server-client structure.As for antibiotic resistance map on our WMS system, we illustrated the infographics and related tables of many kinds of information about antibiotic resistance. The WMS system represented simple spatial information, temporal variation of antibiotic resistance and degrees of correlation between antibiotic resistance and human activities such as emissions of antibiotic resistance matters on hospital or pharmacy. We also considered domestic sewage discharged into river through sewage processing facilities.This system will be contributed to reducing social cost and economic loss caused by antibiotic resistance spreads. These web maps will provide users with correct information on threat of antibiotic resistance.

Online Spatial Data Analysis and Algorithm Development for Geo-scientific Applications Using Remote Sensing Data

Availability of geospatial data from online data repositories and geoportals are increasing with rapid pace. For better utilization of these heterogeneous data sets, it is required to give more attention to develop web based algorithms as well as geocomputation models that allows high-level information extraction from distributed nature of geodata. The Open Geospatial Consortium specification such as Web Processing Service (WPS) provides the solutions for integrating remote sensing data for the computation of algorithms from distributed sources in multi-user environment. The main purpose of present study is to develop and implement a WPS based geoprocesses and analysis approach using Online Image Processing System. The software framework developed during this study is a platform independent solution which is developed using free and open source technology. As a demonstrative case study, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index and Normalized Difference Built-up Index algorithms are annotated for automatic deployment in geoscientific processing workflow environment. The Sentinel-2 data sets and polygon geometry as region of interest are stored and published as web services for input dataset in application server repository. A case study for Champawat district of Uttarakhand state of India has been demonstrated to identify vegetation greenness and built-up sites during the summer season. In order to access the functionalities of the online application, an interactive and responsive Graphical User Interface is developed in web GIS environment. The proposed approach can be very effective and useful to address the key challenges in commercial desktop based software for geoprocessing and analysis of remote sensing data.

Monitoring and Early Warning of Slope Instabilities and Deformations by Sensor Fusion in Self-Organized Wireless ad-hoc Sensor Networks

Geohazards, like landslides in soil and rocks which are induced by rainfall, flooding, earthquakes and human activity are dramatically increasing worldwide. Apart from socio-economic factors, like increasing population and concentrations of settlements on endangered areas, extreme weather conditions are the main reasons for this ascent. But, these occurrences are not only concentrated on the high mountain ranges with steep slopes and strong relief. In February 2003, a landslide in the middle of Germany near the village of Wolfstein-Rossbach damaged some houses (one of them totally). Another example is the Manshiet Nasser failure in Cairo in September 2008, where a large rock tilt buried many houses. This few examples show the devastating effect of geohazards in settlement areas and the need for precise monitoring systems to protect human life and property.
 
 In the frame of the special program “Geotechnologien” of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the joint project “Sensorbased Landslide Early Warning System” (SLEWS) aims at the development of a prototypic Alarm- and Early Warning system (EWS) for different types of landslides using wireless sensor networks (WSN) for real-time monitoring. The WSN consists of a number of so called sensor nodes and a data collecting point (gateway). The solar powered gateway is connected either directly or by GSM/GPRS to the internet and subsequently to a data infrastructure to process the sensor data. Each node has a sensor board were the measuring sensors and the communication and processing unit are integrated. Special features of the Network are the real-time ability, self-organization and self-healing capacity, energy efficiency, bidirectional communication skills and data interfaces regarding OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) specifications. The bidirectional structure of the system enables data transfer not only from each node to the spatial data infrastructure (SDI), but also to transmit commands or software-updates to individual or a group of nodes. Special sensor nodes for the monitoring of surface deformations due to landslides, measuring acceleration, tilting or extension, were developed and tested.
 
 Apart from the detection of direct deformations caused for example by landslide movements, the system also allows the monitoring of indirect deformations on buildings and constructions, like bridge or retaining walls. Furthermore, the remote monitoring of flood control basins, dams or tailings in or close to housing areas becomes easy to set up in a cost-effective way. Open structures of the system enable a very rapid and flexible adjustment to the changed conditions and also permit a simple linkage with other data sources (e.g. climate data) or other sensor networks. Also, temporal deployments for safety purposes in road construction or foundation engineering become possible as the WSN is self-powered, the components are quite small and easy to set up. In the future other sensors may be integrated into the sensor notes so further tasks in spatial environmental monitoring may be covered.
 
 Keywords: Slope instability, deformation, sensor fusion, sensor networks

Setting up a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) for the ROSELT/OSS Network

Environmental monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems are indispensable tools for sustainable land management, especially in dry and fragile ecosystems. The reporting and dissemination of its products and indicators are the key roles to perform their missions. Furthermore, the overall success of such multilateral projects and networks depends on well-organized infrastructures for spatial data management. A spatial data infrastructure (SDI) is an efficient framework to centralize the management of spatial data and information related to multilateral projects for the best sharing and exchange between partners and stakeholders in order to ensure that they are interactively connected to use the data efficiently and in a flexible manner. This paper outlines the work undertaken in partnership between the Geography and GIS Department of the Faculty of Arts, King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia Kingdom, the Geomatics, Earth and Land Settlement Branch of the Department of Geology, Faculty of Sciences of Tunis, Tunis El Manar University, Tunisia, and the Sahara and Sahel Observatory OSS which is an intergovernmental organization, in order to build a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) for the ROSELT/OSS program (Long-Term Environmental Monitoring Observatories Network in the Circum-Sahara of the Sahara and Sahel Observatory). This SDI is entirely developed using Open Source technologies and the extensive suite of OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) standards and specifications, to enable interoperability among and between its different components.

Enabling Efficient Discovery of and Access to Spatial Data Services

Spatial data represent valuable information and a basis for decision making processes in society. The number of specialisms that use spatial data for such purposes is increasing. Increasing is also the number of services enabling to search, access, process, analyse or visualise spatial data. Standardisation activities of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) support standardised sharing of services through the Web. However, many services declared as OGC compliant do not respond or they are not available. The paper introduces an innovative solution for efficient discovery of and access to spatial data services compliant with OGC specifications. The research was performed in the context of the EnviroGRIDS geoportal. Several thousands of harvested services were quality checked and the summary of the testing including the identified problems are presented.

Enhance discovery and retrieval of geospatial data using SOA and Semantic Web technologies

The ability to find and access geospatial data over the Internet through a single tool will be a great benefit for researchers who try to collect relevant data for a particular study. This requires a unified system to bring together diverse data sources so that they can be searched simultaneously in a single environment. Dealing with diversity of data sources and coping with heterogeneities that exist between them are the major challenges in this endeavor. This paper presents the efforts of combining Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) specifications, Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) standards and ontologies to address these challenges. The primary goal is to enhance discovery of web services compliant with OGC specifications and promote access to geospatial information via the OGC services. To this end, this paper introduces an approach for incorporating ontology into UDDI registry and proposes an advertisement algorithm for representing service metadata contained in the OGC capabilities document via UDDI data structures, providing therefore a way to record semantic, descriptive and technical information of OGC services inside UDDI registry. Then the paper illustrates how this information could be used to enhance service discovery with the aid of semantic reasoning. Based on the proposed approaches and service-oriented architectures (SOA) strategies, a web-based prototype system has been developed in order to help users query, access and visualize geospatial data of different types in a unified interface. Several running examples are given to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the prototype.

Transportation Security SensorNet: a service‐oriented architecture for cargo monitoring

PurposeSecurity and accountability within the transportation industry are vital because cargo theft could amount to as much as $60 billion per year. Since goods are often handled by many different parties, it must be possible to tightly monitor the location of cargo and handovers. Tracking trade is difficult to manage in different formats and legacy applications Web services and open standards overcome these problems with uniform interfaces and common data formats. This allows consistent reporting, monitoring and analysis at each step. The purpose of this paper is to examine Transportation Security SensorNet (TSSN), the goal being to promote the use of open standards and specifications in combination with web services to provide cargo monitoring capabilities.Design/methodology/approachThis paper describes a system architecture for the TSSN targeted for cargo monitoring. The paper discusses cargo security and reviews related literature and approaches. The paper then describes the proposed solution of developing a service‐oriented architecture (SOA) for cargo monitoring and its individual components.FindingsWeb services in a mobile sensor network environment have been seen as slow and producing significant overhead. The authors demonstrate that with proper architecture and design the performance requirements of the targeted scenario can be satisfied with web services; the TSSN then allows sensor networks to be utilized in a standardized and open way through web services.Originality/valueThe integration of SOA, open geospatial consortium (OGC) specifications and sensor networks is complex and difficult. As described in related works, most systems and research focus either on the combination of SOA and OGC specifications or on OGC standards and sensor networks. The TSSN shows that all three can be combined and that this combination provides cargo security and monitoring capabilities to the transportation and other industries that have not existed before.

GvSOS: A New Client for the OGC® Sensor Observation Service Interface Standard

AbstractA key problem with sensor networks is achieving interoperability between different networks potentially built using different software and hardware platforms. Services interfaced by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) specifications allow GIS clients to access geospatial data without knowing the details about how these data are gathered or stored. Currently, OGC is working on a set of interoperable interfaces and metadata encodings known as Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) that enables the integration of heterogeneous sensor systems and measurements into geospatial information infrastructures. In this article we present the implementation of gvSOS, a new module for gvSIG to connect to Sensor Observation Services (SOS). The gvSOS client module allows gvSIG users to interact with SOS servers, displaying the information gathered by sensors as a layer composed by features. We present the software engineering development process followed to build the module. For each step of the process we specify the main obstacles found during the development such as restrictions of the gvSIG architecture, inaccuracies in the OGC specifications, and a set of common problems found in current SOS server implementations available on the Internet. For most of the problems found we propose a solution, or at least we present a path that might lead to it.

Integrating Remote Sensing Data with Directional Two- Dimensional Wavelet Analysis and Open Geospatial Techniques for Efficient Disaster Monitoring and Management.

In Taiwan, earthquakes have long been recognized as a major cause oflandslides that are wide spread by floods brought by typhoons followed. Distinguishingbetween landslide spatial patterns in different disturbance regimes is fundamental fordisaster monitoring, management, and land-cover restoration. To circumscribe landslides,this study adopts the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), which can bedetermined by simply applying mathematical operations of near-infrared and visible-redspectral data immediately after remotely sensed data is acquired. In real-time disastermonitoring, the NDVI is more effective than using land-cover classifications generatedfrom remotely sensed data as land-cover classification tasks are extremely time consuming.Directional two-dimensional (2D) wavelet analysis has an advantage over traditionalspectrum analysis in that it determines localized variations along a specific direction whenidentifying dominant modes of change, and where those modes are located in multi-temporal remotely sensed images. Open geospatial techniques comprise a series ofsolutions developed based on Open Geospatial Consortium specifications that can beapplied to encode data for interoperability and develop an open geospatial service for sharing data. This study presents a novel approach and framework that uses directional 2Dwavelet analysis of real-time NDVI images to effectively identify landslide patterns andshare resulting patterns via open geospatial techniques. As a case study, this study analyzedNDVI images derived from SPOT HRV images before and after the ChiChi earthquake(7.3 on the Richter scale) that hit the Chenyulan basin in Taiwan, as well as images aftertwo large typhoons (Xangsane and Toraji) to delineate the spatial patterns of landslidescaused by major disturbances. Disturbed spatial patterns of landslides that followed theseevents were successfully delineated using 2D wavelet analysis, and results of patternrecognitions of landslides were distributed simultaneously to other agents using geographymarkup language. Real-time information allows successive platforms (agents) to work withlocal geospatial data for disaster management. Furthermore, the proposed is suitable fordetecting landslides in various regions on continental, regional, and local scales usingremotely sensed data in various resolutions derived from SPOT HRV, IKONOS, andQuickBird multispectral images.

Standards‐based data interoperability in the climate sciences

AbstractEmerging developments in geographic information systems and distributed computing offer a roadmap towards an unprecedented spatial data infrastructure in the climate sciences. Key to this are the standards developments for digital geographic information being led by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) technical committee on geographic information/geomatics (TC211) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). These, coupled with the evolution of standardised web services for applications on the internet by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), mean that opportunities for both new applications and increased interoperability exist. These are exemplified by the ability to construct ISO‐compliant data models that expose legacy data sources through OGC web services. This paper concentrates on the applicability of these standards to climate data by introducing some examples and outlining the challenges ahead. An abstract data model is developed, based on ISO standards, and applied to a range of climate data –both observational and modelled. An OGC Web Map Server interface is constructed for numerical weather prediction (NWP) data stored in legacy data files. A W3C web service for remotely accessing gridded climate data is illustrated. Challenges identified include the following: first, both the ISO and OGC specifications require extensions to support climate data. Secondly, OGC services need to fully comply with W3C web services, and support complex access control. Finally, to achieve real interoperability, broadly accepted community‐based semantic data models are required across the range of climate data types. These challenges are being actively pursued, and broad data interoperability for the climate sciences appears within reach. Copyright © 2005 Royal Meteorological Society.