Preservation of geospatial data: The connection with open standards development

Abstract

Efforts to preserve geospatial data stand to benefit from the development and implementation of open standards which ensure that data are interoperable not only across software systems but also across time. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international industry consortium of companies, government agencies and universities that work together to develop publicly available interface specifications. OGC specifications support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location- based services, and mainstream information technology. Examples of OGC specifications include Web Mapping Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS), WebCoverage Service (WCS), Geography Markup Language (GML), and OGC KML. Within the OGC a Data Preservation Working Group has been formed to address technical and institutional challenges posed by data preservation, to interface with other OGC working groups that address technical areas that are affected by the data preservation problem, and to engage in outreach and communication with the preservation and archival information community. Key points of intersection between the data preservation problem and the OGC standards development activity include but are not limited to the following: the use of Geography Markup Language (GML) in archival data, development of content packaging schemes, management of data versions, persistent identification of data objects, inclusion of archival use cases in rights management schemes, and preservation of data representations. The attention of the OGC is particularly focused on service-oriented environments and, in this context, the challenge of data preservation will increasingly find intersection with the general problem of bringing a temporal component, including data persistence, to services and associated applications.