December 2, 2010 – The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®), as part of its lead role in the Architecture Implementation Pilot for the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), announced videos showing the remarkable progress that has been made in implementing GEOSS. GEOSS is a major multi-year program of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO). The videos were prepared for the GEO Ministerial Summit and GEO VII Plenary, held 3-5 November 2010 in Beijing, China.
Natural disasters such as the recent floods in Pakistan and the tsunami and volcano eruption in Indonesia require multinational cooperation and sharing of geospatial information and processing resources. To serve this goal, the GEOSS 10 Year Plan defined a bold vision to create a system of systems based on voluntary contributions and interoperability agreements. OGC standards along with other open standards and common practices have been used to create the GEOSS Common Infrastructure. With contributions from hundreds of organizations the GEOSS Pilot has led to substantial achievements, cross-cutting all Societal Benefit Areas.
Stefano Nativi of the Institute of Methodologies for Environmental Analysis (IMAA), part of the Department of Earth and Environment of the Italian National Research Council (CNR), said, “Currently, one of the major challenges for scientific community is the study of climate change effects on life on Earth. To achieve this, it is crucial to understand how climate change will impact on biodiversity and, in this context, several application scenarios require modeling the impact of climate change on distribution of individual species as well as on biodiversity loss in Protected Areas.”
Arnaud Cauchy of Spot Image, an EADS Astrium company, explained, “In Disaster Management, the benefit of interoperability could be evaluated by the number of human lives that have been preserved. In this context, rapid response is a major value that GEOSS brings. The AIP-3 Disaster Management Reference Scenario is a key contribution, helping participants to define efficient procedures and related GEOSS services to provide the right response at the right time to an emergency situation. The scenario demonstrates information flows involved in providing real-time updates to an evacuation plan during a flood disaster.”
The “GEOSS Architecture Progress” video (5 minutes) (http://www.ogcnetwork.net/GeossArchProg) provides an overview of the substantial progress made so far in implementing the bold plan established five years ago to build GEOSS. Five AIP-3 Demonstration Videos (each 5 minutes) (http://www.ogcnetwork.net/geoss/aip-3/) show some of the work that has been done in GEOSS workshop demonstrations that have involved scores of participants over the last few years. The workshop scenarios address GEOSS Societal Benefit Areas such as energy, disaster management, biodiversity, and air quality.
The Group on Earth Observations (GEO) is a voluntary partnership of governments and international organizations. It provides a framework within which these partners can develop new projects and coordinate their strategies and investments. GEO is composed of national governments and the European Commission as GEO Members and intergovernmental, international, and regional organizations with a mandate in Earth observation or related issues as Participating Organizations.
The OGC, a GEO Participating Organization, is an international consortium of more than 400 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. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.
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