Request Closed: October 24, 2023 9:00 am — November 23, 2023 11:59 pm
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has opened a solicitation to fund development of additional developer resources that will support the GeoParquet Standard as it moves towards initial release. Proposal submissions close November 23, 2023.
As is with most recent OGC Standards, the development of GeoParquet’s technical specification is occurring alongside the creation of code, sample data, tests, and other resources. To best support the creation of a robust GeoParquet ecosystem and assist implementers of the Standard, OGC has opened a Call For Proposals to fund development of some of GeoParquet’s developer resources.
OGC is offering funding towards contributions to any or all of the following:
- Sample data in GeoParquet format that is permissively-licensed and easily accessible to allow GeoParquet tool developers to test their work. Such data include migration of open datasets that are of general interest. Ideally, This GeoParquet will be an additional available format on different public data stores.
- Testing tools that can be integrated into the OGC Validator.
- Open-source libraries to read/write GeoParquet (with permissive/non-viral licenses) in a variety of languages.
GeoParquet adds geospatial types to Apache Parquet, described by the Apache Software Foundation as “an open source, column-oriented data file format designed for efficient data storage and retrieval. It provides efficient data compression and encoding schemes with enhanced performance to handle complex data in bulk.” For an introduction to the GeoParquet format, see this blog post.
OGC is advancing a number of Standards to enable cloud-native geospatial ecosystems. GeoParquet fits in the group of data encoding Standards that are highly performant for large, cloud-based data stores, such as Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) for tiled rasters and Zarr for datacubes. GeoParquet will, in time, enable vector datasets to be as readily accessible from the cloud as the other formats already well-used in the community.
More information on GeoParquet can be found on the OGC GeoParquet GitHub Repository.
OGC Members interested in staying up to date on the progress of this standard, or contributing to its development, are encouraged to join the GeoParquet Standards Working Group via the OGC Portal. Non-OGC members who would like to know more about participating in this SWG are encouraged to contact the OGC Standards Program.
To submit a proposal, visit the GeoParquet Call For Proposals page. Proposals are due by November 23, 2023.