17 June 2013. On June 5, at the Sensors Expo & Conference, Melanie Martella, Executive Editor of Sensors, presented the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) with the magazine’s 2013 Best of Sensors Gold Application Award. Greg Buehler, OGC’s Director, Outreach & Communication Services, accepted the award.
The Best of Sensors Application Awards recognize advances in sensor and sensor-related technologies, either in the form of novel technologies or as significant improvements in existing technologies.
Melanie Martella said, "I am thrilled to to recognize the OGC for its Sensor Web Enablement Initiative. The consortium’s members who have worked on this project over the years are creating a robust platform that makes it easier for people to make efficient and effective use of the wealth of Web-connected sensor data available. This is an important project with broad scope and I congratulate them on their achievement."
Mark Reichardt, President and CEO of the OGC, said, "This is a wonderful honor that recognizes the vision and hard work of a very large number of OGC member representatives. Mike Botts, chair of the OGC Sensor Web Enablement Domain Working Group, deserves special mention for bringing SensorML into OGC 13 years ago and creating the momentum in OGC to advance our sensor standards framework. He still leads the working group effort, but scores of others have also worked to make these standards an extraordinary and very important part of easing the integration of sensors into the broader IT infrastructure. This award honors their service, and they can all be very proud of what they’ve done."
The Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) (http://www.ogcnetwork.net/swe) standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) comprise the only truly open international standards suite that provides a comprehensive platform for publishing, discovering, assessing, accessing and using sensors and sensor systems of all kinds. The standards documents are freely available on the web, as are open source software implementations of the standards. Their use requires no proprietary platform support of any kind, and yet they can be implemented on platforms other than the open Internet and Web. The encodings and interfaces are based on fundamental, widely used and open Internet and Web standards and best programming practices. The consensus process in which SWE standards are created and maintained is open to all who want to participate.
SWE standards have been implemented in hundreds of applications by private sector, government and university developers. A few examples include:
US National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Integrated Oceans Observing System (IOOS)
CitySense sensor network City of Cambridge, MA: A real-time data integration and analysis system for air quality assessment.
German Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System (GITEWS)
Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand – Nepal Wireless Project: Monitoring Climate Change in the Himalayas
Taiwan Debris Flow Monitoring and Alerting system
Japan National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science & Technology (AIST): Earthquake Monitoring and Warning System (QuiQuake)
Europe/European Space Agency (ESA): Tasking of satellite assets as part of Heterogeneous Missions Accessibility (HMA)
EO2Heaven project (http://www.eo2heaven.org/): A spatial information infrastructure, which applies SWE, services to monitor human exposure to environmental pollution and for an early detection of infections.
Europe Emergency Response: (http://www.ess-project.eu/ an infrastructure based on SOS, SPS, and SES to provide real-time information to crisis managers during abnormal events to improve the management between forces on the ground (e.g., police and firefighters) and the control centers.
CSIROs South Esk River Hydrological Sensor Web in Tasmania – next generation catchment management
US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Unified Incident Command and Decision Support (UICDS) program
About the OGC
The OGC is an international consortium of more than 480 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/ contact.