OGC's
Column for the June, 1998 issue of GIS World
OGC Supports Gore's Digital Earth
Lance McKee
Vice President, Corporate Communications
Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC)
My car radio never delivered happier news than on March 13, when I heard
about Al Gore's proposal to park an imaging satellite a million miles above
the sunny side of the Earth and stream an image of Earth to Earth. My first
business plan, written twelve years ago, was for the Home Planet Company,
which would have sold things bearing the image of the Earth from outer space,
including a "whole Earth screensaver," produced as Al Gore has
described. That was just a pipe dream, but Gore's "Triana" satellite
is not.
Good ideas take time, and deserve critical review. Cliff Kottman, OGC's Vice
President, Technology Development (who, by the way, when he worked at the
US Defense Mapping Agency, conceived the Digital Chart of the World project
and obtained its funding) sent this email when he heard the news on March
13:
"This is all good, but it doesn't (yet) have much GIS content. Who will
archive this data? Who will superimpose national and state boundaries, and
otherwise
georegister the video images? Who will build catalog services based on windowing
into the globe? These questions have the same answer: "ANYONE WHO WANTS
TO." And all these implementations must interoperate because otherwise,
where is Gore's dream? Gore's vision would become chopped liver: a disconnected
jungle of truncated leads and isolated strands of information. So the natural
consequence, and a direct subtext, of Gore's initiative is an urgent call
for standards that enable the live earth broadcast to be a gateway to geospatial
information and geoprocessing that will enlighten the globe's inhabitants
about their small but rich and beautiful world."
A dual icon
Of course, much of the value of Triana will be simply to project that "Whole
Earth" image, without the national and state boundaries. It will be
a touchstone, signifying like a religious symbol the spiritual experience
reported by almost all who have orbited Earth, but also signifying like a
text book cover all the very practical geographic information that is accumulating
on magnetic and optical media at gigabytes per second as you read this --
orthophoto quads, transportation network files, digital elevation models,
census data, multispectral images, and thousands of other basic and derived
information products for all kinds of uses.
Interoperability is the key
Gore knows we need standards. In his January 31 "Digital Earth" speech
(see the text at OGC's web site, http://www.opengis.org) he called for broad
cooperation in building a rich set of georeferenced geographic information
resources and the technology to put them at the fingertips of everyone of
all ages. He said: "The Digital Earth will need some level of interoperability,
so that geographical information generated by one kind of application software
can be read by another. The GIS industry is seeking to address many of these
issues through the Open GIS Consortium."
A few years from now, when my daughter visually zooms in on our house from
a million miles away, interfaces conformant with the OpenGIS Grid Coverages
Specification will enable the seamless real-time hand-off from the Live Earth
image to some commercial one-meter Earth imagery. That zoom will positively
affect my daughter's awareness of herself relative to 1) the Earth and 2)
the ocean of digital geospatial information and technology our industry is
pouring out in front of her.
Geoprocessing interoperability is the key to the Digital Earth, and that
is what OGC works toward. The OpenGIS Specification's open interface approach
enables geoprocessing to become an integral part of the new distributed computing
paradigm in which applets, middleware, components, e-commerce tools, catalogs,
and object request brokers give any networked computing device easy real-time
access to a huge universe of geodata and geoprocessing resources. (Metadata
standards, like those being developed by FGDC, and potentially by the NAPA-proposed
non-federal National Spatial Data Council, are still, of course, an essential
part of the solution.) We at OGC hope Congress will approve money for Gore's
project, and our staff and members stand ready to help in whatever way we
can.
Multifaceted commercial vision
OGC's technology provider members already have the Digital Earth in their
imaginations, and they are designing and building the pieces of it. They
build interoperability infrastructure at OGC's meetings, and back at their
workplaces they are building the superstructure. Software vendors are building
the database engines, visualization tools, image interpreters, data fusion
systems, Web mapping interfaces, geospatial catalogs, and workflow integration
approaches. Telcos are building the "spatial dial tone" for online
services such as spatially aware yellow pages. Data providers and database
providers are tailoring the electronic commerce approaches that will "meter" geographic
information to Internet customers. Universities are looking at map-centered
user interface paradigms, semantic schema managers, and new opportunities
for interdisciplinary research and education. Integrators are architecting
geospatial capabilities into enterprise systems.
The vendors in OGC cooperate because they know that non-interoperability
is the bottleneck that has retarded their market. But OGC also has a strong
and active contingent of users, including federal agencies and integrators,
who help to keep the OpenGIS Specification on track for their needs.
In its Special Interest Groups (SIGs), OGC provides a unique opportunity
for domains in society to direct the unfolding of a key technology. In the
Telco SIG, for example, telecommunications industry experts shape the special
geoprocessing interfaces necessary for their industry. Similarly, other key
stakeholders of the Digital Earth need to be represented in appropriate OGC
SIGs. If the public sector is properly represented in OGC, the educational,
environmental, and public service applications of the Digital Earth have
a much better chance of unfolding as Al Gore has described.
Government involvement in OGC brings benefits for both government and industry.
NIMA, USDA NRCS, USGS NMD, FGDC, and other federal members of OGC are increasing
their involvement, providing vendors with an opportunity to stay in tune
with those agencies' needs, and providing those agencies with the best and
least expensive intelligence for both guiding the integration of geospatial
interoperability into their architectures and influencing the course of commercial
geoprocessing technology development. NRCS is working with MIT in an OGC-affiliated
technology planning project sparked by an orthophoto quad browser built by
John Evans for his Ph.D. thesis. NIMA is using OGC to support "spiral
development" and COTS component based procurements, a model that could
be adapted by other federal agencies. The NAPA study is likely to produce
a coordinating body for the nation's local and regional spatial data infrastructures,
and there is an opportunity to bring requirements from that set of stakeholders
into OGC's consensus process. FGDC is involved with OGC on a number of projects,
including an interoperability demo that can involve a wide variety of vendors
and public data providers, and that could be grown into a showcase for Digital
Earth.
Must be global
The vision is local and international. OGC's excellent working relationship
with ISO TC/211 bodes well for a future of coherent international geospatial
standards, and OGC continues to develop relationships with institutions such
as Japan's National Spatial Data Infrastructure Promoting Association and
Europe's Joint Research Center and key European universities. Such relationships
lay important technical and institutional groundwork for global initiatives
such as the Administration's Global Disaster Information Network and the
multinational global change research effort.
A marketplace, but more
Ask yourself, "Is the Web only a marketplace?" As Gore's Digital
Earth idea takes shape in the public consciousness, many of its solid parts
will be taking shape in the marketplace, and OGC serves that marketplace.
In OGC, private sector and public sector Digital Earth participants have
a natural forum to which they can bring their ideas, programs, and questions.
Here they can see how the technology framework is developing so they can:
propose changes; plan products; plan business processes and procurements;
plan market strategies; and find partners, customers, and providers. Mostly
commerce-related. Ah, but the outcome: the Digital Earth!
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