Rob Atkinson
Rob Atkinson is a Research Engineer at the OGC focussed on supporting effective design and use of interoperability standards, with a particular focus on improving the ability of applications to effectively discover and exploit meaning of data. Rob is actively engaged in improving the ability of the community to share machine-readable specifications for both APIs and data models, and integration of these. Rob has been a charter member of OsGeo since inception, and worked with the first iteration of GeoServer to establish is as the first open source reference implementation.
Sessions
The need to integrate geospatial data into products and services has resulted in a proliferation of Free and Open Source web APIs which often do not adopt any standards, thus requiring more development time and a lack of interoperability between solutions. For instance a bounding box has been written in multiple ways, depending on whether developers use the coordinates of the four corners, only upper left and lower right, latitude or longitude first, or some other variation.
The good news is that the Open Geospatial Consortium, a neutral, consensus-based organization, has been developing open standards for geospatial information. These standards are developed as building blocks, which means they could be easily incorporated into existing applications in order to enable a piece of geospatial functionality. The location building blocks are freely available to anyone to download and use.
In this presentation, we describe the conceptual model for the existing building blocks, which uses semantic annotations to define the different components. We also describe a practical example of how a building block could be integrated into an application and provide some resources for developers who want to build applications with the location building blocks.