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SpatialNews Press Release
Open Standard For Geographic Image Processing Made Public
WAYLAND, Mass., Feb. 28, 2001--Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC)
announced that the OpenGIS Grid Coverages Implementation Specification, which reached general
consensus in OGC last year, has been finalized and released to the public. It is available at
http://www.opengis.org/techno/specs.htm.
The term "Grid Coverages" refers to satellite images, digital aerial photos, digital elevation data, and
other phenomena represented by values at each post in a "raster" coordinate system (as opposed to
"vector" geodata, in which digital map information is represented using polygons and lines). The
specification describes an open interface that provides communication between software systems for
purposes of requesting, viewing, and performing certain kinds of grid coverage analysis such as
histogram calculation, image covariance and other statistical measurements. Interoperability for a wider
range of image operations awaits the OpenGIS Image Exploitation Services Specification, which is in
progress in OGC's Technical Committee.
Yonsook Enloe, an OGC contributor and employee of SGT working in NASA's Earth Science
Enterprise (ESE) projects, is Coordinator for a CEOS task team creating prototypes that implement
OpenGIS interfaces in support of land cover management. She states: "This specification will
accelerate the extraction of valuable earth information from earth observation satellites and provide for
more rapid studies of important earth dynamics such as temperature distributions, agriculture, forestry,
forest fire management and global trends."
The OpenGIS Grid Coverages Implementation Specification sets forth an extensible framework
supporting the industry's progress toward interoperable geographic image processing and analysis. It
has been a major catalyst for increasing cooperation between all the major standards groups working
in the area of earth imagery. Experts in ISO's Technical Committee 211 and JTC1's Subcommittee 24,
the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) EOGEO initiative, the GeoTIFF effort, and
others have all worked with OGC to bring the various groups work into alignment.
The OpenGIS Grid Coverages Implementation Specification was written with COM and CORBA
implementations in mind, but is general enough in nature to be extended to include other Distributed
Computing Platforms (DCPs) such as JAVA. Most implementations will involve client/server
processing over the web. The specification allows for efficient access to very large datasets, and
supports N dimensions even though most implementations of the specification will be 2D. The
specification also supports: GeoTIFF, an industry standard geographic image format; a wide range of
grid data from raw to thematically classified grid coverages; a number of color models; variable value
sequencing and pixel ordering; and all grid geometries and spatial referencing systems consistent with
geometries and spatial referencing in the OpenGIS Simple Features Specification.
The following companies submitted this implementation specification, in response to the an OGC
Request For Proposals:
- Cadcorp Ltd
- ESRI
- Intergraph Corporation
- Laser-Scan, Ltd.
- Oracle
- PCI Geomatics, Inc
OGC, an international consortium of more than 200 corporations, agencies and universities,
coordinates collaborative development of the OpenGIS Specification and collaborative business
development to support full integration of geospatial data and geoprocessing resources into mainstream
computing. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengis.org.
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