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The benefits of standardisation and interoperability - links to sustainable growth and innovation
The recent completion of the standardisation work performed within the Open Geospatial Consortium by the HMA-FO project which has addressed
- EO products matadata,
- the so-called Feasibility Analysis, based on the Sensor Planning Service,
- the Online data access, based on the Web Coverage Service and
- the Product Ordering
have raised the question on which are the benefits of the ongoing work finalised at standardisation and interoperability. The EO ground segment interface harmonization activity has been based on seven high level objectives:
- To manage and reduce technical risks in EO systems and operations
- To manage and reduce cost of EO system and operations
- To establish the baseline for the development of the European Space infrastructure in the context pf the GMES Programme capable of harmonizing and exploiting relevant national initiatives and assets
- To allow interoperability within and across organizations
- To increase competitiveness of European Space (and downstream) industry
- To maintain the leadership in EO systems and operations and avoid insurgence of undesired standards
- To ensure that technology drivers for the European guaranteed access to Space are lead by European Requirements
The high level objectives are nice to have. However to maintain the required efforts on standardisation we need to convince management and stakeholders providing supporting arguments and answers to at least three questions:
- How do we measure the benefits of interoperability?
- Does standardisation support economic growth?
- Does standardisation support knowledge and innovation?
The first question will be addressed today at a dedicated workshop of the INSPIRE Conference, we’ll wait for the outcome of the discussion to further report on it!
For what concerns standardisation support to economic growth, knowledge and innovation, two independent reports from France and UK concur in the finding that standardisation supports the economic growth, knowledge and innovation. For what concerns innovation in particular it has to be noted that
- standardization helps to build focus, cohesion and critical mass in the formative stages of a market;
- standardization codifies and diffuses state of the art technology and best practice;
- open standards are desirable to enable a competitive process of innovation-led growth.
Progress of OGC standardisation and INSPIRE Ortoimagery guidelines
The Open Geospatial consortium technical committee meeting is ongoing in Bonn. Progress is being made on two standards relevant for ground segment harmonisation: the first concerns the ordering services for Earth observation products, the second concerns Earth Observation profile for the Web Coverage Service.
For what concerns the ordering service for EO products improvements have been agreed to take into account the experience made during the implementation of the Reference Order Server to ensure that the schema can be correctly managed by the .NET code generator, and to minimize as much as possible the references to the external schemas in order to improve the compatibility with XML Data Binding Tools like XMLBEANS, and the possibility to make reference to a ProductID. Voting is ongoing with some of the standard working group members questioning the introduction of an anyType element at order and order item level.
For what concerns the EO application profile for the Web Coverage Service 2.0 the standards working group will propose the OGC technical committee to adopt the pending document.
The EO-AP provides the following specification elements:
Definition of specific Earth Observation coverages (EO Coverages) which have a latitude/longitude or projected x/y spatial extent and a temporal validity extent. EO Coverages are derived from Referenceable Grid Coverages and Rectified Grid Coverages as defined in the GML Application Schema for Coverages OGC 09-146r1. Each EO Coverage has an EO metadata set OGC 10-157r2 contained in its metadata which describes the coverage on hand on a higher semantic level. Furthermore it allows to group EO Coverages as retrievals of plain 2-D EO Coverages named "Datasets", and "Stitched Mosaics" or "Dataset Series".
The progress made on the EO WCS AP and the fact that its reference to coverages goes through the Observation & Measurements model via the geographic markup language application schema for coverages, makes it an ideal candidate for building the extensions needed to provide the INSPIRE Ortoimagery guidelines.
New ordering standard submitted to OGC
As conclusion of almost a year of work in the standard working group, the Open Geospatial Consortium has launched a call for public comments on the candidate OGC Ordering Services for Earth Observation Products Interface Standard. This interface standard defines interfaces for ordering products derived from Earth observation satellites. The ordering services are implemented in the ground segments of several partners within the Ground Segment Coordination Body. The ordering service standardisation is an important step in fulffilling the objective of harmonised ground segment interfaces.
The finalisation of the Ordering Service specification marks an additional achievement in the approach taken to standardise Earth Observation ground segment interfaces within the OGC with the objective of fostering the seamless integration of Earth Observation data exploitation and services within the wider geospatial domain.
The candidate standard has been submitted by the OGC Technical Committee Ordering Standards Working Group and it is based on a specification prepared and prototyped by the ESA HMA-FO project Task 1 lead by Telespazio with the support of Conterra. The consortium has benefited from prototypes and feedback provided by Eumetsat, DLR, ESA and others.
The candidate OGC Ordering Services for Earth Observation Products Interface Standard can be found at: http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/75.
Towards more SAFE archive format
ESA has been working on the sandard archive format SAFE since 2004. Current SAFE format has been discussed within the CCSDS, the consultative committee for space data systems and follows the reference model for open archival information system. SAFE has been even considered at a certain point in time a candidate format for data dissemination towards the users within the Sentinels. This idea has been abandoned in favour of formats for dissemination that follow best practices in the community using the data. Needless to say that the product metadata shall follow the information model recommended from the HMA architecture working goup, and where applicable, from the INSPIRE Orthoimagery Worikng Group.
A recent brainstorming in the facilities and technology division has confirmed the need for a SAFE format within long term archiving and preservation activities. Changes may come out to ensure the alignement with the HMA recommendations on product metadata which are used within the ground segment and by feedback from experts and best practices used by the partners within the ground segment coordination body which share similar archiving and preservation problems.
Beyond semantics
Whilst the number of missions made available to scientists and service providers and value adders is increasing, there is a growing interest in ontology and semantics as the tools to allow the access and conceptual navigation across this wealth of data. As the number of actors accessing the data increases there is as well the tendency to address community specific requirements in building the ontology, thus raising the requirements for a level of mediation across the various ontologies.
RSS Workshop - Feedback form available!
Your feedback is of paramount importance to us!
A workshop feedback form is avaible at the registratio desk for your feedback. The form allows both an anonymous feedback, as well as details on your own interests and feedback on the workshop presentations. There is room for indicating your requirements and suggestions.
You are welcomed as well to provide directly comments on the workshop or to discuss your requirements directly on the Join & Share area by replying to this post!
Security: OGC publishes Best Practice document
One year after the start of the reviews at the HMA Architecture Working Group, the document addressing User Management Interfaces for Earth Observation Services has been finalised and voted for publication as OGC Best Practice. You may remember that the initial version of the document was strongly criticised by the Conterra team working for EUMETSAT. Our forum however keeps a log anly of some of the discussions related to the document, which was improved thanks to the comments of the Security Working Group of the Open Geospatial Consortium and of the ESA Earth Observation Payload Data Ground Segment Security Officer. Furtrhermore the document reflects the input coming from imlementations ongoing at DLR, ESA and Spot Image.
Open Source software and an implementation guidance document are available here.
User Management Interfaces for Earth Observation Services
Renewed interest in security and single sign on
Resources for your EO research, application or service
Workshop Announcement:
Resources for your EO research, application or service
ESA – ESRIN, October 12, 2010
The workshop objectives are to:
- provide an overview of the support for EO research and service development made available by the Ground Segment Department within the Earth Observation Programme of the European Space Agency.
- offer the opportunity to scientists, algorithm, application and service developers to provide requirements and feedback on expected evolutions of available tools and environments.
During coffee breaks, lunch and after the event, it will be provided access to and demonstrations of all the environments including processing on demand, service support and image information mining.
Sensor Planning Service for Earth Observation missions under discussion at OGC
Pleasefind enclosed the OGC announcement for tha HMAAWG supported SPS EO profile
The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) members are seeking comments on the "Earth Observation Satellite Tasking Extension for OGC® Sensor Planning Service (SPS)." The SPS
configuration proposed in this profile supports the programming of Earth Observation (EO) sensor systems. The candidate standard describes a single SPS configuration that can be supported by many satellite data providers who have existing facilities for managing
sensor system programming requests.
This SPS standard defines interfaces for queries that provide information about the capabilities of a sensor and how to task the sensor, where the sensor may be any type of sensor with a digital
interface. The SPS and EO-SPS standards are part of the OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) (
http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/markets-technologies/swe ) suite
of standards. SWE standards enable developers to describe, discover,
task, and access any Internet or Web accessible sensor, transducer and
sensor data repository.
The candidate OGC® Sensor Planning Service Application Profile for Earth Observation Sensors and information on submitting comments on this document are available at
http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/70. The public comment period closes on September 16, 2010.
