The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has announced its intention to form a Space Standards Domain Working Group (DWG).
According to the OGC, the aim of the Space Standards DWG will be to “serve as a forum to identify requirements for standardisation that are unique to the Space Domain, identify any organisations that may be addressing those requirements, and promote harmonisation and integration of shared concepts across all Space Standards”.
The group is seeking public comment on the Space Standards DWG’s draft charter (PDF), with submissions to be accepted until 22 September 2023.
The OGC says that the space domain is currently “composed of a wide collection of initiatives, each addressing one part of the whole, and each developing their own standards and conventions,” adding that attempts to “harmonise across these initiatives are limited, and there remains no common concept of ‘space standards’.”
The Space Standards DWG will:
- Serve as a coordinating body for all OGC DWGs working in the Space Domain.
- Reduce the Space Domain into a manageable set of sub-domains.
- Identify and document missions in the Space Domain that may have unique standardisation requirements.
- Identify and document initiatives that are developing Space standards and conventions.
- Identify opportunities for OGC to provide spatiotemporal data models, services, design patterns, and other architectural elements that can serve as a common capability across all Space standardisation initiatives.
- Stay current on OGC space-related initiatives and be prepared to report on these efforts to other non-OGC initiatives.
- Liaison with space standardisation initiatives as needed to promote commonality in space-time concepts.
- Establish Standards Working Groups as needed to address space-related requirements that are not otherwise being addressed.
The OGC says that, while it can’t solve the entire problem, it can “make sure that the concepts of space and time are consistent and interoperable across the domain” and identify emerging space domain standards that may influence OGC standards and encourage the affected OGC SWGs and DWGs to take action.
