Late November saw the first Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) meeting to be held in the southern hemisphere take place at the University of Sydney. Attendees gathered for a week of standards and domain working group meetings.

As part of this the CSIRO (Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) sponsored a focus group on geospatial data modelling. The auditorium was packed with people curious to learn more and advance the innovative architecture and frameworks which the CSIRO's architects have developed for semantic data management.

A framework now exists to enable ISO 19100 geographic information standards to be put to work.  The model-driven approach involves crafting UML application schema which inherit the ISO standard patterns then enable the generation of encodings in conforming GML (geography markup language) to create specific information products (especially those transacted as web services).

New Zealand took advantage of all this geo-standards activity down under by inviting Mr Mark Reichardt, President and CEO of OGC to visit Wellington on 6 December.

The joint invitation from Landcare Research (who recently joined OGC) and the New Zealand Geospatial Office who coordinated the visit, saw Mark fly to Wellington to host a day of meetings and presentations.

In total more than 70 people from a wide range of organisations attended to learn more about the considerable impact that open geospatial standards are having at a jurisdictional and global level.

The day started with a breakfast attended by industry and government leaders. Government chief executives and spatial business leaders together heard about the business imperatives for taking a standards-driven approach. Mark used a series of inspirational case studies to highlight value propositions.

Two well attended focused seminars with Mark followed. The day concluded with Landcare and the New Zealand Geospatial Office running parallel seminars/workshops.

The New Zealand Geospatial Office used the opportunity to launch its new standards portfolio. A workshop using the World Cafe format helped participants explore questions about geospatial interoperability.

This was as much an opportunity for the New Zealand Geospatial Office to listen to the needs of the geospatial information community as it was for the community to leverage a networking opportunity. Participants discovered who else is interested in advancing or accelerating open geospatial interoperability.

One of the key messages from the day was the need for New Zealand to advance 'seeding' projects i.e. projects that deploy the latest standards and technologies and which enable the benefits of open geospatial interoperability to be demonstrated, help grow awareness, improve collaboration, and help grow experience and skills for deploying the standards.

Mark Reichardt's presentations are available online:

Breakfast meeting with CEO's - Benefits discussion -

http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=41983

Disaster Management and OGC specifications in action -

http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=41984  

Overview of OGC Standards & Programmes -

http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=41985 

Richard Murcott

Geospatial Standards Leader
New Zealand Geospatial Office