FOSS4G 2023

Geo enabling your APIs with the location building blocks
06-28, 13:30–14:00 (Europe/Tirane), UBT D / N112 - Second Floor

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.

Joana Simoes (she/her) is the Developer relations at OGC, taking the lead at connecting the standards with the developer community.

Joana has been working in the tech industry for more than fifteen years. After acquiring a PhD at UCL, her drive to solve real-world problems has led her to SMEs, an international organisation and a start-up.
Joana has been very much involved in the FOSS community, in particular in what concerns geospatial technologies.

Joana is the founder of ByteRoad, a SME in the field of data engineering and geospatial analytics.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7180-3367

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I hold an MSc in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Cantabria, and have more than 10 years of experience designing and building software systems in different environments, especially web applications, as well as data management and publishing solutions. A large part of my career has been focused on Linked Open Data and the Semantic Web, both as a modeller and as a software developer.

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.

Piotr is leading and managing OGC Innovation Program initiatives in agriculture, marine and building environment. He is a member of the joint ISO, RDA, ITU, GEO, IDSA, OASC activities. He holds an MSc in computer science from Warsaw University of Technology and an EMBA from WUTBS/CEU. Piotr has multi-year experience in the commercial software development and services provision for Earth Observations, telecommunication, and financial markets. His expertise focus around geospatial digital twins, data spaces and semantics. Piotr is fluent in the secure, distributed systems for mass market and large-scale computations architectures, products development and capacity building.

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