New OGC standard has an important part in improving shared situational awareness.

A new standard being developed in the OGC has an important part in improving shared situational awareness. The ‘OWS Context’ standard encodes the key elements of a common operating picture: the geographic area, an optional time range, and an ordered series of layers from different services or inline content. This allows a situational awareness view of one user to be passed to other users so that the same picture can be reconstructed. The context standard also allows catalogue queries and results from multiple catalogues, and web processing requests and results to be passed around easily.

The important idea here is that the context document can pass references to the services which provide the layers (which can be WMS, WFS, WCS, WPS and CSW services and more) or can provide inline content (in a range of formats including GML and KML). It also passes styling information and metadata related to services or content. This is much more general purpose than previous attempts to pass context around.  And in general it has the benefit of being relatively compact (as it is typically carrying references rather than the data) and so can be easily emailed around a community of interest, or held in a registry. Both XML and JSON Encodings are being developed, the latter easily exploitable in standard browser technology.

The OWS Context standard development came out of experimentation within the OGC OWS-7 Testbed and has progressed to the point where a draft standard is imminent. Envitia are charter members of the OWS Context SWG, and Roger Brackin, the Envitia Research Director is Co-Chair (with David Wesloh of NGA), and is also Editor of the Abstract Specification. It is hoped that a public draft of the Abstract Specification and Implementation Specifications for XML and JSON can be issued ready for review in the OGC March Technical Meeting in Austin, Texas. Envitia have agreed to be an early implementer of the OWS Context Standard.

Roger Brackin MSc
Director