OGC invites you to indulge in a SELFIE: the Second Environmental Linked Features Interoperability Experiment

February 21, 2019

SELFIE aims to create a standards-based method to publish and use linked data that's compatible with current web development/W3C best practices

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) invites interested members & non-members to participate in OGC's Second Environmental Linked Feature Interoperability Experiment (SELFIE). SELFIE is one part of an ongoing initiative of OGC to build a web of environmental data in such a way that it is easily and reliably discovered, navigated, and used by contemporary web developers.

In recent years, environmental domain data models have been established by a number of OGC groups, including the Hydrology, Agriculture, Geoscience, and Meteorology & Oceanography Domain Working Groups. However, there is no best practice or standard methodology to encode documents that link features in different domains – such as a rivers, aquifers, or soils – with observational data about those features. A common approach to encoding such links is required to allow cross-domain and cross-system sharing and interoperability of such linked information.

With this in mind, the original ELFIE brought together interested stakeholders around the shared goal of providing a best practice for encoding documents that express links between hydrologic and related features from models. The Experiment produced the public OGC Environmental Linked Features Interoperability Experiment Engineering Report summarizing the overall cross-domain, inter-standard findings and recommendations for a best practice and/or standard that should follow. A summary of ELFIE is available on the OGC ELFIE Project Page.

Building on the content-focused outcomes of the first ELFIE, SELFIE will design and vet a Web-resource model for APIs to follow as well as network behavior for cross-domain linked feature data that complements and uses WFS3 as a building block. This aims to answer the question: ‘How do we use linked data in a way that's compatible with W3C best practices and leverages OGC standards?'

SELFIE aims for focused simplicity, representing resources built from potentially complex data for easy use on the Web. While SELFIE will test a specific resource model and will follow W3C best practices and OGC standards, a wide range of participant-provided domain-use cases will be used for testing. Ultimately, this work is intended to satisfy the needs of many use cases and many kinds of features, from disaster response & resilience to environmental health and the built environment.

If you are interested in participating in the Second Environmental Linked Feature Interoperability Experiment (SELFIE), please contact techdesk@opengeospatial.org.

The kickoff will be held via telecon on 29th April 2019. To learn more about SELFIE, including details concerning the kickoff telecon, visit the Second Environmental Linked Feature Interoperability Experiment (SELFIE) webpage on OGC's website.

About OGC

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international consortium of more than 525 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that ‘geo-enable' the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful within any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at www.opengeospatial.org.

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