Athina Trakas
Athina has presented internationally on geo-information management topics, mainly in the areas of networking within the community, OGC processes, interoperability, innovation and standards.
She has a diploma in Geography and started working in the field of GIS in 1998 in the private sector. In 2006, she joined OGC and since 2008 she is charter member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). In 2009 she was appointed OGC’s Director for European Services, adding Central Asia and Africa in 2015.
Sessions
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) have a long and natural tradition of collaborating. In 2022, the Memorandum of Understanding between both organizations was updated - to pay tribute to ongoing and future activities.
In the initial MoU (2008), OGC and OSGeo agreed to work closely to coordinate with each other’s memberships regarding new standards developments and standards changes that may be required as a result of open source programs. Another important aspect of the relationship is to keep each other well informed of the respective activities and directions. Both aspects have proven to be of great importance. One goal was and is to coordinate activities in such a way as to maximize the achievement of both organizations’ mission and goals.
That includes to identify open source technologies that can be used as reference implementations for and validate compliance tests developed for OGC adopted standards.
Since the first MOU, there has been an increase in OGC on developer focus and engagement of software communities and activities. Increased collaboration has also occured by way of the OGC API code sprints. In addition, key opportunities for cross pollination have evolved given shared missions (FAIR data) and the viewpoint that FOSS4G software is beneficial for all software.
The development of the OGC API suite of standards is an excellent example on how the MoU works in practical terms. The OGC APIs are a family of Web APIs that have been created as extensible specifications designed as modular building blocks that enable access to spatial data that can be used in data APIs. These revolutionary APIs make location information more accessible than ever before through the use of RESTful principles, and the OpenAPI specification for describing interfaces. OGC APIs have been tested in close collaboration with the global developer and end user communities through hackathons, sprints, and workshops to provide a modern solution to tomorrow’s location sharing issues. For example, the 2021 Joint Code Sprint organized by OGC, OSGeo and the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) included open source implementations of OGC APIs - and became a standing sprint activity that was repeated in 2022.
This presentation provides a deeper dive into the new Memorandum of Understanding and how both open standards and free and open source software can benefit from one another.
Over the past several decades a significant number of geospatial datasets have been published on the Web. Many of those datasets were published through implementations of classic OGC Web Service standards. As time has gone past, the architecture of web applications has evolved, propelled by new Web and Internet standards. This evolution of web application architecture has led to a revolution in how geospatial datasets are published on the Web. To ensure that the revolution in geospatial data publication has interoperability at its core, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has developed a series of Web Application Programming Interface (API) standards.
The OGC API suite of standards is a family of specifications that have been designed as modular building blocks that spatially enable Web APIs that offer access to spatial data and implementations of geospatial algorithms. These revolutionary APIs make location information more accessible than ever before through the use of the OpenAPI specification for describing interfaces. The use of the OpenAPI specification means that implementations of OGC API Standards can describe themselves to levels of detail previously unachievable through the classic OGC Web Service standards. Such an ability to self-describe is significant because it has enabled software developers from a variety of disciplines to implement OGC API Standards to address the needs of their communities.
This presentation will provide an overview of the background, current status, and future plans for the development of OGC API Standards. The presentation will describe plans for the development of resources that improve the ability of developers to implement OGC API Standards. The presentation will also present a selection of case studies of open source software that has been implemented or enhanced during OGC Innovation activities such as testbeds, hackathons, and sprints (including the 2022 Joint Code Sprint organised by OGC, OSGeo and the Apache Software Foundation (ASF)).