As you know Snowflake is a big fan of the Open Geospatial Consortium and all things standards. Snowflake has been a member of the OGC since 2002 and we’ve pretty much attended at least two of the four Technical Commitee meetings (TCs) each year since then, not to mention the 8 OWS Testbeds we’ve worked on.
The next TC is a little different for us at Snowflake as we’re sponsoring it! Hosted at the EUROCONTROLheadquarters in Brussels the November TC has a packed Agenda. As you’d expect, firstly there’s plenty of Aviation on the agenda: there’s two meetings of Aviation Domain Working Group and there’s an Aviation focused Interoperability Day on the Friday. On the Monday afternoon, Snowflake is leading the discussion on the WFS profile for Aviation that we authored as part of our OWS8-AIM work.
Outside of Aviation there are open sessions on INSPIRE, The Internet of Things and the Digital Agenda for Europe and in parallel to those sessions are the meetings of standards in the making. There are two types of meetings at a TC: Standards Working Groups (SWG) and Domain Working Groups (DWG). SWGs are the nitty gritty of standards and in order to attend an SWG you need to be registered beforehand, DWG’s are more open groups and tend to focus more on best practice, outreach and discussion around a particular domain.
If you haven’t been to a TC before, its worth a trip. That said, it takes a while to get used to a TC and I’d definite recommend attending the new member orientation on the Monday . The OGC membership is full of some great thought leaders and at times the discussion can get very heated and down in the micro detail. OGC members are passionate about standards which for a newbie can be a little bemusing, that said this is what these meetings are all about … to work through the detail so that when a standard hit the streets its well thought through a fit for purpose.
Debbie and I will be in attendance next week so please do catch up with us
Registration is now open, so you can register here.
