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.

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.

ICA joins the OGC as Associate Member

The 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.

The Commissions on SDI and Standards, Cognitive Issues in Geographic Information Visualization and Open Source Geospatial Technologies have started regular discussions to coordinate the ICA’s involvement in the OGC. We think that the ICA can make a particular contribution to the standardization of cartography-specific terminology and by bringing in a user-centred perspective to the technical standards of the OGC through communicating our understanding of what design choices are effective. We are considering organizing a workshop attached to the ICC2021 where we can discuss and share our ideas with others in the ICA community.

Posted in OGC

Invitation: 3rd International Workshop on Spatial Data Quality

Valletta SkylineFollowing previous successful workshops in 2015 and 2018, EuroGeographics and EuroSDR, in conjunction with OGC, ISO and ICA, are pleased to announce a third workshop on spatial data quality, to be held in Valletta, Malta on the 28th and 29th January 2020. The announcement and more information about the workshop is available here.

Timelines:

  • 31st May 2019 Workshop Announcement and call for papers
  • 1st August 2019 Website opens for paper submission
  • 1st October 2019 Deadline for submission of content
  • 29th November 2019 Notification of acceptance / rejection of papers
  • 6th January 2020 Deadline for submission of final versions
  • 28th/29th January 2020 Conference in Malta

Announcement: SDI-Open 2019

SDI-Open 2019, the pre-conference workshop on spatial data infrastructures, standards, open source and open data for geospatial will be held on 15 July 2019 in Tokyo, Japan, immediately before the 29th International Cartographic Conference. The workshop is jointly organized by our Commission on SDI and Standards, the Commission on Open Source Geospatial Technologies and the Commission on Map Production & Geoinformation Management.
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Collaborative custodianship through collaborative cloud mapping

Presentations and photos from the workshop…

Introduction to collaborative cloud mapping by Peter Schmitz, Chair: ICA Commission on Map Production and Geoinformation Management

Introduction to collaborative custodianship by Serena Coetzee, Chair: ICA Commission on SDI & Standards

Introduction to the South African SDI (SASDI) by Maroale Chauke, Secretariat: Committee for Spatial Information, Directorate: NSIF

Introduction to collaborative data custodianship in SASDI by Nicolene Fourie, Chair: Data Subcommittee of the Committee for Spatial Information

Case study: Collaborative custodianship of the Basisregistraties Adressen en Gebouwen (BAG) in the Netherlands by Martijn Odijk, Project Manager: Policy Geo Information (National SDI), Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, Netherlands

Case study: Collaborative custodianship of the Centraal Referentieadressenbestand (CRAB) in Flanders by Ziggy Vanlishout, Programme Manager: Authoritative Data Sources, Informatie Vlaanderen, Flanders, Belgium

Case study: Collaborative cloud mapping for federal address and street network datasets in Austria by Markus Jobst, Co-Chair: ICA Commission on Map Production and Geoinformation Management

Collaborative mapping with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) by Frikan Erwee, UP Alumni, Former President of the YouthMappers Chapter at UP

Invitation: Workshop on OGC and its Geospatial Interoperability Standards

The ICA Commission on SDI & Standards, together with the University of Pretoria and the South African Committee for Spatial Information, will host a two-day workshop on OGC specifications, presented by Prof Franz-Josef Behr from the Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences (Germany) and Co-Chair of the Commission. Delegates will be introduced to the technological foundations behind of OGC specifications, there will be hands-on sessions with specific implementations of OGC specifications, and an outlook into the future of OGC standardisation developments.

The programme for the workshop, to be held at the University of Pretoria on 20 and 21 September 2018 provides more details. If you would like to participate, please contact  Serena Coetzee or Franz-Josef Behr.

Presentations: 2nd International Workshop on Spatial Data Quality

Our Commission co-organized the 2nd International Workshop on Spatial Data Quality, held at the Old University Campus, Valletta, Malta, 6-7 February 2018. Commission members contributed with presentations on topics related to quality standards. The workshop presentations are available in PDF format at http://eurogeographics.org/event/2nd-international-workshop-spatial-data-quality.