OGC Standards for making geospatial data, maps and charts findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable – Update

30th International Cartographic Conference 2023
Pre-conference workshop organized by the
ICA Commission on SDI and Standards and the Open Geospatial Consortium

Friday, 11 August 2023, Cape Town, South Africa
Colophon Room, SANBI, Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation, Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, Cape Town
Directions from the conference venue (take an Uber or taxi)

To attend, register here.
Please bring your own laptop. Lunch and refreshments in Kirstenbosch are for your own cost.

8:30 Arrival and registration
9:00 Welcome and introductions
Serena Coetzee, Chair: ICA Commission on SDI & Standards
9:10 Introduction to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and its standards
Gobe Hobona, Director of Product Management for Standards, OGC
9:30 Technical foundations of OGC standards
Franz-Josef Behr, Co-Chair: ICA Commission on SDI & Standards
10:30 Break
11:00 OGC API Standards
Gobe Hobona, Director of Product Management for Standards, OGC
12:00 Lunch
13:30 Make queryable Maps with OGC API – Features
Sverre Iversen, Geological Survey of Norway
14:15 Question and Answer Session
14:30 Further into OGC API Standards
Gobe Hobona, Director of Product Management for Standards, OGC
16:00 End

For more information, please contact Serena Coetzee or Franz-Josef Behr.

OGC Standards for making geospatial data, maps and charts findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable

30th International Cartographic Conference 2023
Pre-conference workshop organized by the
ICA Commission on SDI and Standards and the Open Geospatial Consortium

Friday, 11 August 2023, Cape Town, South Africa
Colophon Room, SANBI, Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation, Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, Cape Town
Directions from the conference venue (take an Uber or taxi)

To attend, register here.
Please bring your own laptop. Lunch and refreshments in Kirstenbosch are for your own cost.

8:30 Arrival and registration
9:00 Welcome and introductions
Serena Coetzee, Chair: ICA Commission on SDI & Standards
9:10 Introduction to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and its standards
Gobe Hobona, Director of Product Management for Standards, OGC
9:30 Technical foundations of OGC standards
Franz-Josef Behr, Co-Chair: ICA Commission on SDI & Standards
10:30 Break
11:00 OGC API Standards
Gobe Hobona, Director of Product Management for Standards, OGC
12:00 Lunch
13:30 Make queryable Maps with OGC API – Features
Sverre Iversen, Geological Survey of Norway: Filtering (search) both human- and machine readable, navigation in the datasets and linked datasets, how to build chartography (symbolization)
14:15 Question and Answer Session
14:30 Further into OGC API Standards
Gobe Hobona, Director of Product Management for Standards, OGC
16:00 End


For more information, please contact Serena Coetzee or Franz-Josef Behr.

First information about ICC2023 pre-conference workshop

On the occassion of the 30th International Cartographic Conference 2023 our Commission organizes a pre-conference workshop on “OGC Standards for making geospatial data, maps and charts findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable”.

This event will be jointly prepared by the ICA Commission on SDI and Standards and the Open Geospatial Consortium.

  • Friday, 11 August 2023, Cape Town, South Africa
  • Colophon Room, SANBI, Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation, Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, Cape Town

Details will be announced soon.

Call for Contributions to the Applied Geoinformatics for Society and Environment (AGSE) conference, Trivandrum, Kerala, India

The AGSE 2022 conference “Applied Geoinformatics for Digital Transformation and Environmental Stewardship” The conference is taking place 01-05 Nov 2022 in on-site and hybrid mode at Digital University Kerala co-organized by C V Raman Laboratory of Ecological Informatics, School of Informatics, Digital University Kerala, by Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences, and by our Commission on SDI and Standards.
This year’s event will focus on the following topics:

  • Applied Geoinformatics: Open Source Geospatial Technologies, OpenAPI based services, AOIs to deliver Climate Data
  • Digital Transformation: Internet of Things, Sensor Web, SDI and linked data , Digital Twins, Smart Cities, Realtime 3D
  • Environmental Stewardship: Geodata and Geoscience to support realisation and measurung SDGs, disaster manegement, safety and emergency response

As part of the event, we plan again to provide keynotes, paper presentations and workshops.

Details can be found at http://applied-geoinformatics.org/yourls/agse2022home or http://applied-geoinformatics.org/.

I invite you to contribute (again) to this event:

Best regards – Franz-Josef

Invitation to the Business meeting of ICA Commission on SDI and Standards

We now have the confirmation of the exact time and venue details for the next Business meeting of the ICA Commission on SDI and Standards. The full business meeting will take place in hybrid mode:

You are all invited and very welcome to join the Commission’s meetings and to share your input for our further programme.
Let us initiate further collaborative research on topics related to SDI and Standards as well potential activities in 2022 and 2023!

Sharing cartographic knowledge

We are inviting you to a ICC 2021 pre-conference joint workshop by the ICA Commissions on SDI and Standards, Cognitive Issues in Geographic Information Visualization, Open Source Geospatial Technologies and Geospatial Semantics

Date: Monday, 13 December, 9:00 – 12:30 (CET) / 8:00 – 11:30 (UCT)
Format: hybrid
Register here

Venue for physical participation: Firenze, Via Laura, 48, Room A2.09
Virtual participation: zoom link will be emailed to registered participants

The International Cartographic Association (ICA) recently joined the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), an international consortium of more than 500 businesses, government agencies, research organizations, and universities. Their focus is on standardization towards the interoperability of geospatial data, applications and services “to make geospatial (location) information and services FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable”. Our Commissions, together with the Working Group on the Cartography Body of Knowledge, have started discussions on how the ICA could contribute to the OGC. Two potential topics emerged which will be explored further in this workshop. 

1. Standardization of terminology
Several multilingual dictionaries of cartographic terms have been published since the 1970s, however, new terms have emerged since then, e.g. map tile, pan and zoom. At the same time, these terms have not been defined in many languages, e.g. those spoken in Africa and Asia. We have started compiling a list of cartographic terms relevant today for using maps. Through this workshop we would like to further refine the list by involving workshop participants. 

2. Making cartographic knowledge accessible to software developers
Contemporary cartographic practice uses a range of computing technologies for creating maps. Many software tools for making maps are not built by cartographers, but rather by software engineers, some of whom have limited cartographic training or mapmaking experience. Researchers have tried to capture cartographic knowledge to support them, e.g. through expert systems, cartographic workflows, or cartographic ontologies. In this workshop we will present cartographic and technical perspectives on map making and discuss how to bridge the gap between these different viewpoints.

The full schedule is available here.

ICC 2021 pre-conference workshop: Sharing cartographic knowledge

A joint workshop by the Commission on SDI and Standards, the Commission on Cognitive Issues in Geographic Information Visualization, the Commission on Open Source Geospatial  Technologies and the Commission on Geospatial Semantics is planned on the day before  the 30th International Cartographic Conference (ICC 2021), to be held in Florence, Italy, from 14 to 18 December 2021.

Monday, 13 December, 8:30 – 13:00
Format: hybrid
A program and link to the registration form will follow.

2021 March OGC Member Meeting summary available

Last week the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) completed its 118th Member Meeting. A set of public slides (over 400 MB!) from the Closing Plenary reports is available for download here: https://portal.ogc.org/files/?artifact_id=97133

As mentioned before ICA recently joined the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) as an associate member. As an international consortium of more than 500 businesses, government agencies, research organizations, and universities, the OGC focuses on the interoperability of geospatial data, applications and services “to make geospatial (location) information and services FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable” (https://www.ogc.org/).

OGC membership makes it possible for ICA Commission Members to participate in standards development and gives them access to member-only content in the OGC portal. This includes attendance and participation in OGC meetings, voting rights in working groups, and insight into geospatial technology trends with recommendations for actions in the technology forecast report. Additional benefits are the awareness and promotion of the ICA and cartography to a broader public and further intensified contact with leading geospatial organisations.