JISC theme(s): e-Research, Information environment, Access management
Committees: JISC Support of Research committee
The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) is a non-profit international voluntary consensus standards organization that is leading the development of standards for geospatial and location based services. OGC activities are especially relevant to JISC in that geospatial services are inherent in both national infrastructure participation and research services that JISC member bodies need to provide.
This programme stems from two areas of work that would be beneficial in terms of promotion of the OGC working in conjunction with the current Grid infrastructure:
- Security - with the exception of a recent discussion document (Matheus, 2005 [1]) and the newly formed Digital Rights Working Group (GeoDRM) the OGC community has done little work on secure access to services, relying on guaranteeing secure access by controlling the access layer. However, both Lawrence et al (2004 [2]) and Matheus have argued that methodologies based on controlling access to individual data elements behind secure services are necessary for scalable and interoperable services across differing management domains.
- Workflow - OGC services are intended to provide access to datasets and services described by OGC catalogue services and ISO19115 citations. At the basic level, it can be argued that this paradigm might not best be supported by web services that only provide access to datasets mediated by specific hosting services. Grid services which exploit WS-Addressing or similar technologies might provide access to data entities independently allowing the construction of more complex workflows.
It was also recognised that in order to promote what was learnt and get input on the work to be completed then there would need to be funding to attend geospatial events.
Aims and objectives
The aims and objectives of the three areas are:
- Building prototypes of OGC services that exploit WS-Security and other appropriate grid based security mechanisms. An important requirement of successful prototypes will be the ability for servers to provide secure access to resources at the dataset level, not just via secure wrapping of the service delivery. As a result of the prototypes, proposals will be made to OGC on how to modify the OGC web service standards to support such secure access (such proposals will have to use OGC compliant architectural terminology).
- Developing and extending workflow engines to support and orchestrate OGC services (including prototypical examples of WPS wrappers to other grid services) described using ISO19119 and understanding the relationship between ISO19119 and other grid service registries (to possibly include engineering ISO19119 compliant versions of existing grid service registries).
- Attendance at and contributions to OGC technical meetings and reporting on developments to the e-science community via written reports and presentations.