2026-09-02 –, Conference Management Room5
OGC API Environmental Data Retrieval is a powerful new API standard for accessing time series data about geospatial areas. This session will explain how EDR standardizes time series data access and how it can be integrated with RDF vocabularies and JSON-LD to standardize cross-organizational terminology.
OGC API Environmental Data Retrieval (EDR) allows for a convenient access pattern of time series data within a geospatial region. EDR standardizes many common array based data storage formats like Zarr, GeoParquet, and NetCDF into a common web-accessible OGC API. However, until now, one of the historical challenges with standardizing data with common APIs is that semantically equivalent parameters may be named differently in different data sources. For instance, “Topographic height” and “Elevation above Sea Level” may refer to the same information, but have poor UX when combining together in the same API due to disparate parameter names. This talk will reference how W3C Linked Data Resource Description Framework (RDF) standards and vocabularies like SKOS can be used to solve this semantic access issue. We will reference how you can use a semantic resolution service in your OGC API servers to map parameters to a canonical term and in doing so, improve the UX of your data integrations. For instance, instead of referencing the raw string “Elevation above Sea Level” a client can provide the standardized schema.org RDF vocabulary term “schema:elevation” and abstract away the intricacies of each data source while preserving data provenance. This talk will reference water data hubs created for the United States Bureau of Reclamation and Arizona State University that use such tools and methodology.
Background info on the importance of terminology standardization can be found at https://schema.org/
Info on pygeoapi, the server software we use to implement both OGC API Environmental Data Retrieval and our semantic standardization process can be found at https://docs.pygeoapi.io/
Indicate what is (are) the open source project(s) essential in your talk:This presentation will discuss web standards including OGC API Environmental Data Retrieval, SKOS, JSON-LD, as well as pygeoapi, an open source geospatial server project which implements such standards.
I make my conference contribution available under the CC BY 4.0 license. The conference contribution comprises the abstract, the text contribution for the conference proceedings, the presentation materials as well as the video recording and live transmission of the presentation:
Colton is a software engineer for the Center for Geospatial Solutions at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge Massachusetts, USA. He works on a variety of backend and data engineering tasks related to water data.