Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Get your geek on - GeoSciML WG formed in OGC

The new GeoSciML SWG has officially formed at OGC.    Yahoo!

This won't mean much to anyone except a tiny group of geo-geeks, but we're excited.   To translate, a standards work group (SWG) has been formed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to establish the Geoscience Mark-up Language (GeoSciML) as an open-source international standard.

To put that in practical terms, Google took Keyhole Mark-up Language (KML) through the same process.  KML is the interchange standard for Google Earth, that allows anyone to develop applications to run on top of their global image platform. 

GeoSciML is the data interchange standard underlying the US Geoscience Information Network that powers the National Geothermal Data System, and is used by the 117-nation OneGeology consortium, and many other systems.    OGC approval will speed its adoption and support more applications being built on it.

The charter for the SWG can be downloaded from:
https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=51803&version=1

This SWG will focus on adapting the GeoSciML v3 GML (Geography Mark-up Language) schema to an OGC modular specification and XML implementation and adoption of an abstract specification and XML implementation specification as OGC standards. Work will be based on the GeoSciML v3 model as documented at http://www.geosciml.org/geosciml/3.0/doc/.

The SWG chair is Ollie Raymond with Geoscience Australia.  Steve Richard,  AZGS Geoinformatics Section Chief, has been the lead US representative on the international committee developing GeoSciML over the past dozen years, and is a member of the new SWG.
   

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