Ontologies in the SWE World

Meeting Information

The OGC held the OWS-4 Initiative Kickoff meeting at Oracle Corporation in Reston, Virginia on June13-16, 2006.

Jack Pellicci provided leadership and inspiring words to kickoff this meeting. Oracle's Wendy Choate and Ann Fonfara managed the facilities and monitored the daily meetings. More than 110 people participated in the four day meetings.

OWS-4 builds on activities of previous initiatives and to address sponsors' interests and needs which included sensor webs, geospatial digital rights management, geospatial semantics and knowledge management.

The OWS-4 Initiative has been organized around the following threads to address sponsors' requirements and continuation of OGC initiatives of the past.

• Sensor Web Enablement (SWE)
• Geo Processing Workflow (GPW)
• Geo Decision Support (GeoDSS)
• Geo-Digital Rights Management (GeoDRM)
• CAD / GIS / BIM
• OGC Location Services (OpenLS)
• Compliance Testing (CITE)

Most of these threads represent continuation of work begun in previous initiatives adding new requirements to continue progress towards maturation of existing specifications and to define new candidate specifications. Others seek to extend the integration of technologies in new areas including CAD/GIS/BIM. This thread seeks to move toward seamless access to information across the extremes of spatial scales, across the different semantic domains and across the lifecycle of a project.