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Wednesday, February 6, 2008

OGC Approves Sensor Web Observations and Measurements Encoding Standard

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) announced that its members have
approved version 1.0 of the Observations and Measurements Encoding
specification as a final OpenGIS Implementation Standard. The two-part
Observations and Measurements Encoding specification "defines an abstract
model and an XML schema encoding for observations and measurements. This
framework is required for use by other OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE)
standards as well as for general support for OGC compliant systems
dealing in technical measurements in science and engineering. As a new
international consensus standard in an era of increasing scientific
cooperation, O&M promises to play an important role in Web-based
publishing of real-time and archived scientific data across research
disciplines and application domains." An 'Observation' is an action with
a result which has a value describing some phenomenon. The observation
is modelled as a Feature within the context of the General Feature Model.
An observation feature binds a result to a feature of interest, upon
which the observation was made. The aim of the OpenGIS O&M Standard
is to "define terms used for measurements and the relationships between
them, mainly to improve the ability of software systems to discover and
use live and archived digital data produced by measuring systems. When
scientists and engineers encode data in O&M, they can easily publish
the data (or live data feeds) in catalogs and registries so others can
efficiently discover, access and use the data, using relatively simple
software. The scope of the specification covers observations and
measurements whose results may be quantities, categories, temporal and
geometry values, coverages, and composites and arrays of any of these."

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