OGC ARD Standards Working Group
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) are working to establish the OGC Analysis Ready Data Standards Working Group (ARD SWG). The group, in partnership with ISO/TC 211 and CEOS, will develop a multi-part Standard for geospatial Analysis Ready Data, building upon work done on CEOS-ARD by the Land Surface Imaging Virtual Constellation (LSI-VC) and CEOS Analysis Ready Data Oversight Group.
OGC is a collective problem-solving community of more than 550 experts representing industry, government, research and academia, collaborating to make geospatial information and services findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.
CEOS has established, via numerous consultations with the broader community, that formal standardisation of the concepts developed through CEOS-ARD is necessary to achieve broad uptake, particularly by the commercial sector. Over the past couple of years the LSI-VC and CEOS-ARD Oversight Group have been engaging with OGC, ISO (International Standards Organisation) and IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) to understand the best way forward.
Defining ARD through international standards bodies, such as OGC and ISO, will also help promote the concept and avoid the divergence that can be caused by various groups working towards different interpretations of the same concept.
The OGC ARD SWG will include a number of CEOS representatives, who will work jointly with the planned ISO/TC 211 ARD Standard project team to define a multi-part Standard that specifies a set of minimum requirements that a geospatial data product shall meet in order for the product to qualify as an ARD product. This would extend the scope of ARD from satellite data to all geospatial data.
The CEOS-ARD concept and Product Family Specifications were tested, evaluated, and assessed by OGC during Testbed-16, results of which were published in the ARD Engineering Report in 2020. Building on this, space agencies participating in the OGC Disaster Pilot 2021 introduced a number of CEOS-ARD products into the disaster decision-making process, greatly simplifying the use of satellite data in disaster-related decision making.
The OGC Disaster Pilot 2021 concluded with a realisation of the need to broaden ARD concepts to cover other types of geospatial data and to create international ARD standards through the formal standard-setting processes of ISO and OGC. The OGC Disaster Pilot 2022 set an action item to start an OGC ARD Standards Working Group to work jointly with the project team in ISO TC 211 to develop joint ISO-OGC standards on geospatial ARD.
Group will meet on an ad-hoc basis at the 125th OGC Member Meeting, to be held February 20-24, 2023, at ESA ESRIN, Frascati, Italy. The specific ARD SWG session will be on February 21, at 2:20-3:40 pm, local time. Virtual participation is also possible.
CEOS is excited to support the ARD SWG, and are excited to see the CEOS-ARD concept taken further to create more applications in both the public and private sector.
