Name of the Share-PSI workshop : Lisbon

Title of the Best Practice: The Central Role of Location

Outline of the best practice

Geospatial technologies play an important role in business, government, and research applications and workflows. However, the benefits of using these technologies are often limited by the inability to effectively share information. To address this problem, government, private sector, and academic organizations use the OGC consensus process to cooperatively define, develop, test, document, validate and approve interface and encoding standards and best practices that solve interoperability problems.

Location data pours from mobile devices, stationary sensors, airborne imaging systems and modelling applications. The explosion in location data offers great potential. Integration of human, physical, and digital systems operating in the built environment can improve governance, business, resilience and quality of life. Too often, though, location data is locked up in ad hoc and proprietary encodings and interfaces.

Public administration bodies together with architecture, engineering, and construction firms as well as building owners, brokers, component vendors, operators, insurers, inspectors, tenants, finance companies, fire departments and other stakeholders want to be able to provide information to other stakeholders or use information created by other stakeholders. They want to see, test and modify buildings and capital projects (bridges, airports etc.) in collaborative planning sessions while the structures are being designed, and they want to know as much as possible about risks, liabilities, costs, options and opportunities before they commit to designs and contracts. Some want the encoded descriptions of their offerings or requirements to be as discoverable and usable as possible, while maintaining data rights and security. Others want to take full advantage of "smart building" sensor/actuator systems and "smart grid" energy generation and storage components and utility energy management programs. Others want to participate in new markets that are emerging around built environment data.

Information technology plays an increasingly important role in public safety and law enforcement. Most public safety and law enforcement information technology applications require the use of location-enabled data. Therefore, the efficient and effective utilization and communication of these data is an important requirement for the majority of decision support applications. The OGC is the international standards development organization most responsible for the open standards that enable such communication.

The ability to keep citizenry safe, prevent crime, and protect against acts of terror depends on the ability to acquire relevant data, rapidly share appropriate data, analyze the information at hand, and make smart operational decisions. Turning seemingly disparate data into actionable intelligence, through the 'intelligence life-cycle' of planning, direction, collection, processing/exploitation, analysis/production, and dissemination depends on geospatial and temporal correlation. Along with proper training and equipment, being 'armed' with location based situational awareness is what assures timely safety and security measures are taken.

Law enforcement, civil security and public safety applications are made up of data, networks and web services that tie together levels of command, departments, organizations, dispatch users, field mobile users, and citizens with current and accurate role-based location information. Benchmarks from some urban law enforcement organizations indicate that geospatially enabled policing yields valuable improvements. For example, geospatial analysis has helped law enforcement implement 'hot spot' policing for over 20 years. Identifying high concentrations of crime in small geographic areas facilitates effective prevention and enforcement strategies that have proven to reduce crime.

Progress in predictive modeling, rapid response, the integration of real time sensor feeds, video, analytics and so forth involves a requirement for many systems, old and new, from many different vendors using a variety of data formats and encodings, to exchange geospatial information in real time with minimal data loss. Examples of information that needs to be accessed and integrated into workflows include street maps, traffic flows, vehicle or sensor location coordinates, flood zones, camcorder views, live and stored aerial imagery, routes, line of sight analysis services, statistics, and floor plans. These data differ not only in their data types and encoding systems, but also in the naming systems that users have developed to describe features, phenomena and activities. Most people unfamiliar with geospatial technologies assume at first that all such information can be easily managed by systems programmed to handle latitude and longitude. When viewed at the level of detail necessary for setting up actual communication between such systems, however, the problems are daunting.

Solving these difficult geospatial communication problems requires open standard encodings and interfaces. Through the work of the OGC and other standards organizations, many of the necessary standards are available to developers. Much work remains, though, to develop profiles, application schemas and best practices based on the standards, and to harmonize standards that have been developed by different standards organizations.

Communicating geospatial information is a critical requirement all along the diverse, complex and dynamic value chains related to energy and utilities. Such communication involves many different systems with different owners and purposes, and interoperation between these systems requires that they implement open standard data encodings and software interfaces. Many of these standards are now available to developers, but much work remains to develop profiles and application schemas based on the standards, and to harmonize standards that have been developed by different standards organizations.

Open standards are important because information involves, by definition, communication, and communication depends on shared systems of signs, symbols, encodings etc. Companies, government organizations, universities, and non-governmental organizations join the OGC to participate in the development of shared open interfaces, encodings and best practices that support the communication of geospatial information and service queries and responses. Nature can provide an infinite supply of geospatial data related to energy. The more we can gather, share and use this data in a global information network environment, the more efficient, effective and wise we can become.

Management summary

Challenge

As indicated in the outline above, spatial data plays an important role in many parts of the public administration. The goal is to make all this data available as open data, following open standards and open data models.

Solution

By applying standards developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium, public sector information can be provided in an efficient and interoperable way to many other data sets and processing or visualization components. The best practice recommendation given herein is to use standards such as WFS, WMS, GML, IndoorGML, CityGML, SOS, or other OGC standards to ensure standardized access to all public sector information with spatial characteristics.

Best Practice Identification

Why is this a Best Practice? What's the impact of the Best Practice?

By using OGC standards to publish public sector information, it becomes much easier to integrate this information with other data sets that are served at similar interfaces. Data becomes discoverable using standardized catalogs and can be used as part of initiatives such as INSPIRE, the European Spatial Data infrastructure.

Link to the PSI Directive

• Open Data platform(s) / Publication and deployment of information/data and metadata
• Techniques w.r.t. opening up of data / Technical requirements and tools
• Dataset structures, formats, APIs / Structuring of information/data, formats, APIs
• Encouraging (commercial) re-use
• Data discoverability

Why is there a need for this Best Practice?

As shown above, most of valuable public sector information has spatial components to it. In order to make maximal use of this data, it shall be made available at standardized interfaces following standardized formats. By using standards produced by the Open Geospatial Consortium, a very high level of interoperability is ensured, paving paths to new businesses and further commercialization.

What do you need for this Best Practice?

This best practice is based on OGC technologies. All it takes is making public sector information available at OGC Web service implementations.

Applicability by other member states?

OGC standards are used world wide. Therefore, this best practice targets global information exchange directly.

Contact info - record of the person to be contacted for additional information or advice.

Dr. Ingo Simonis Director Interoperability Programs & Science Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) t. +49 6192 922 38 43, e. ingo.simonis@opengeospatial.org