download as a pdf - Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing ...

Part III. Appendix 2: Data Transportsoftware and which enables fishery data to be exchanged interoperably. Other interest groups havetheir own standard modules. All the modules, however, share certain concepts: geospatial, taxonomic,physical, chemical.Standards for interoperability among modules are promoted by OBIS. Indeed, OBIS actively incorporatesstandards developed by such national and international standard bodies as the Open GISConsortium (OGC) and the Taxonomy Database Working Group (TDWG).Communication within OBIS and between OBIS and the rest of the world occurs via HTTP, andXML is heavily used.The portal/provider software will be upgraded in March 2003 to a product of the open source softwareproject Distributed Generic Information Retrieval (DiGIR), and the federation core schemasare available to all.OGC/OGISThe following was taken from the OGC website.The OpenGIS Consortium operates to develop interoperable technologies involving geospatial information.The organization comprises two primary programs, the Specification Program and theInteroperability Program. The Specification Program operates through Technical (TC) and Planning(PC) committees to identify the standards required to foster interoperability among variousgroups (SIGs) within the geospatial information community. The Interoperability Program (IP)identifies and manages testbed and pilot projects that implement the proposed standards originatingin the Specification Program, feeding the results of those activities back into revisions ofthe underlying standards. Combined, these two programs function to develop publicly accessibleimplementation specifications for the development of standards-based commercial off-the-shelfsoftware (SCOTS) for the geospatial information community.There are two important sets of OpenGIS Implementation Specifications grouped by service category:OpenGIS Web Mapping Services: This is a family of specifications that enable servers to dynamicallyquery, access, process, and combine different types of spatial information over the web withOpenGIS Specification conformant servers developed by other companies and organizations. To175