FOSS4G 2023

Spatial data interoperability has been on the spot among the Open Geospatial Consortium members for almost 30 years, but the current moment is notable for several reasons. An enormous amount of data is growing exponentially due to the novel sensors that bring observations from previously inaccessible areas in such resolution. We can observe and explore the global ocean with modern computational resources and AI models. Federated Data Spaces initiatives emerge with the paradigm of multi-source data integration harmoniously supporting heterogeneous models.
Speakers will present recent advancements in the data mesh methods based on two environments endorsing open source implementations used for the integrations.
First is the Federated Marine SDI (FMSDI) Pilot, which focuses on advancing the implementation of open data standards, architecture, and prototypes for use with the creation, management, integration, dissemination, and onward use of marine and terrestrial data services for the Arctic. Use cases developed in the recent phase of the FMSDI pilot further demonstrated the capabilities and use of OGC, IHO and other community standards in response to a grounding event and the evacuation of a cruise ship or research vessel in the Arctic.
The approach collated with Iliad - Digital Twin of the Ocean and its interoperability patterns model. Based on the specific requirements for data transfer, access and computation, it looks to generalise core architectural patterns with standard implementations. These patterns address the core issues of data publishing, aggregation and extensive analyses close to the data. Together, they enable a viable overall digital twin ecosystem. Data mesh of observations with data lakes and assembly are essential building blocks that allow the flow and synchronisation of data between different data owners. A open, common information model, defined on the domain-specific and well-known generic ontologies, Analysis Ready Data, and Essential Variables concepts, allows for the traceability of provenance and various expressions. It is a critical prerequisite to achieving data interoperability and explainable AI. Application packaging of processing chains allows for seamless compute-to-data, remote computation, or even mobile control when data is too big to flow. The computation is executed in a controlled environment, and the results harmonised for further use or available as decision-ready information.
Presenters will describe these patterns and illustrate them with OGC and partners' open implementations (like OGC-NA, EDR, geoXACML, HubOcean sync API) from the projects.

The Open Science Persistent Demonstrator (OSPD) is a long-term inter-agency initiative aiming to enable and communicate reproducible Earth Science across global communities of users and amplify inter-agency Earth Observation mission data, tools, and infrastructures. This talk will highlight the status and roadmap of the initiative (kicked off in 2023) and will provide an outlook on the first pilot activities of the demonstrator, as well as opportunities for participation for the FOSS4G community.
In the scope of this activity, ESA, NASA and OGC work together on the development of a long-term Open Science framework (e.g., a permanent open science demonstrator) in which participating organisations provide data, tools, and infrastructure in a coordinated approach, building on existing investments where appropriate.
In the frame of this activity, the OGC supports the Open-Source and Open Science Community by developing a persistent demonstrator that makes Open Science more tangible to a bigger audience, helps in exploring new forms of communication of scientific results to stakeholders, and helps develop the necessary standards to ensure the highest levels of interoperability across participating organizations. At the same time, it makes Earth Observation results available to other disciplines and communities, creates attention beyond the Earth Observation community, and directly impacts decision makers and political agendas.
The goal here is to demonstrate interoperable, collaborative research that allows reuse of existing components. These other resources are either offered as part of emerging Open Science Environments or in the form of either directly accessible “cloud-native” data/functions or by means of Web APIs. To reach this goal, it is essential to empower communities of practice to share FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) descriptions of their resources and capabilities. To allow this system to scale, it is crucial to avoid infinite combinations of community and application specific metadata, functions, data and products.
One focus is the facilitation of direct participation of the scientific community as the primary users of this framework, and of the open-source for geospatial community as essential contributors to the activity. To handle modelling complexity, OGC, NASA and ESA will define manageable processes and best practices for communities conducting geoscience research in multiple domains using heterogeneous data and tools on a distributed infrastructure. These agreements will include, but not limited to, standards, vocabularies, and ontologies for data and workflows and develop community-wide open source science mechanisms, modeling considerations and design patterns.

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.