The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is currently running Testbed-15. As a member of the OGC, GeoCat closely follows the developments in GeoPackage and WFS 3.0.
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) develops high quality open standards and constantly picks up important topics for improvement and innovation. As GeoCat works on metadata and geospatial systems, GeoCat wants to be involved in the development of standards and have a voice in it. This also increases the service level for our clients.
OGC Testbed-15
Recently, OGC started to run Testbed-15, with the aim to explore new levels of interoperable geospatial data processing with a focus on data-centric security, federated clouds, service and application discovery, portrayal, machine learning, and delta updates. A lot of theoretical work has been done on these subjects. Now it is necessary to prove things in practice. The Testbed delivers reports of what does and does not work. It is like sitting amidst Lego and trying new things.
GeoPackage with styles encodings
Among the deliverables of Testbed-15 are two topics of special attention to GeoCat. First, GeoPackage with styles encodings. GeoPackage is a new data file format, that will replace shapefiles as the default vector file format. The current question is how to implement style standard formats in the table structure of GeoPackage. In this Testbed, solutions will be tested.
WFS 3.0 with (and without) Styles API
A second topic of interest is WFS 3.0 with Styles API. GeoCat is interested in styles as GeoCat Bridge migrates styles from ArcMap software to the cloud serving them in WFS (Web Feature Service) services. Any changes in style standards and application is important for us and our product users.
The new WFS 3.0 protocol is under active development with its official OGC release coming soon. In this Testbed the usability of WFS 3.0 will be tested in specific cases. For example in the exchange of encrypted data.
Contribution to the development WFS 3.0
GeoCat expert Paul van Genuchten contributed to the development of WFS 3.0 during some left over work hours and spare time. Last year, his colleague Jorge Mendes de Jesus visited an OGC WFS 3.0 hackathon in Fort Collins, USA. ‘It was most interesting to see how the new standard was dynamically being created and development as an agile process,’ Jorge states.
By the end of 2019, WFS 3.0 might already be finished and approved by OGC. Jorge expects a rapid acceptance and implementation of WFS 3.0 since it is more oriented to the World Wide Web. ‘In five to ten years, WFS 3.0 will replace WFS 2.0 as the worldwide standard vector data exchange and will be used by thousands of organisations.’
Testbed results
In the Testbed process, GeoCat is an observer. We follow the OGC webinars where developers publish their preliminary results and progress and discussions on both topics take place, and deliver input if necessary.
In April, OGC published the results of the Testbed-14 Innovation Initiative.
Contact: Paul van Genuchten, paul.vangenuchten@geocat.net
