The Open Geospatial Consortium has been hard at work on many fronts to drive down barriers to interoperability and to facilitate more open dialog between organizations and institutions. I just conducted a Q&A with David Schell, founder and chairman of the board of OGC, in order to get up to date on the many initiatives. One of the more interesting areas for our coverage deals with the better sharing of information about global change, and I enjoyed Schell’s answer, paraphrased below.
“GI Science” as it’s usually used is still too narrow a term. “Interoperability science” encompasses what we are talking about. One of the first interoperability science issues we need to address is the issue of sharing of information between various data centers, and making research data more discoverable and accessible. Data centers can’t be stovepipes anymore, they have to be “loosely coupled,” so any data center can be accessed by any data provider or user, with appropriate permissions, of course.
We’ve been working toward this for years in terms of technical interoperability issues, and we have working groups in hydrology, Earth system science, etc. who are developing application schemas that meet their intra-community and inter-community data sharing needs. We see individual scientists and small groups in various projects moving in this direction, but what’s really needed is a cultural dialog.
The OGC working groups are hard at work on things like geosemantics, data quality and uncertainty, geospatial rights management, “table joining,” and many other challenges, and application domains are using the OGC to facilitate both technical and semantic interoperability.
This focus on interoperability science is a growing niche to drive through both process and workflow in order to deal with global change. Read the full interview with Schell for more insight into OGC’s ongoing work.
