The University of Texas at Austin will host the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Technical Committee Meeting on March 19-23. The OGC is an international consortium of more than 435 companies, government agencies, research organizations and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available standards that make it easier for systems to communicate geographic information.
“There is a great need for research in our area, and there is a significant and expanding role for OGC standards in research, education and communities of practice,” said Mark Reichardt, the consortium’s president and CEO. “The OGC and The University of Texas at Austin both have much to gain from a continuing dialog.”
The Center for Research in Water Resources (CRWR) at The University of Texas at Austin Cockrell School of Engineering is an OGC member and has been a key contributor in the development of WaterML 2.0, a candidate OGC standard for the representation of hydrologic observations. This standard supports encoding of hydrologic and hydrogeologic observation data in Web-based data sharing scenarios involving activities such as hydrologic monitoring and forecasting, operation of dams and water supply systems and disaster management.
“WaterML 2 is a fundamental advance the first public standard for exchange of water data through the Internet. It will make water data more accessible and usable throughout the world,” said David Maidment, a professor in the university’s Cockrell School of Engineering and the CRWR.
WaterML 2.0 is the result of an international cooperative effort of the OGC Hydrology Domain Working Group, which involves hydrologic and government agencies, software providers, universities and research organizations from Australia, the United States, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and other countries. The OGC Hydrology Domain Working Group and the OGC Meteorology and Oceanography Domain Working Group are Joint Working Groups of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the OGC.
A video detailing WaterML is available.
