February 2012 Archives

We’re off to Amsterdam on 6^th-8^th March for ATC Global 2012, the largest international ATM exhibition of its kind, so it is pretty timely that yesterday the OGC announced the recent progress by the global aviation community in the adoption of an international framework of standards to enable communication in a net-centric, globally interoperable Air Transport System.

As you may already be aware, we have been involved in the OGC prototyping testbeds (OWS-6, OWS-7 and OWS-8) which have assisted in the evaluation and adoption of AIXM and WXXM, both of which are based on the GML encoding standard.

If you want to find out more about AIXM, WXXM and the value of open geospatial standards, the OGC, in collaboration with EUROCONTROL and the FAA, has organised a workshop at ATC Global 2012 - "Use of Open Standards in the Modernisation of ATM" – on Tuesday the 6^th March from 10.00 - 13.00 in the Workshop Theatre, Hall 9 which Ian (Managing Director here at Snowflake) will be participating in.

The workshop will cover the role of open standards in supporting and accelerating the ongoing modernisation of ATM. It will be a great opportunity to hear from industry leaders including George Percivall, Chief Architect and Executive Director, Open Geospatial Consortium; Paul Bosman; SWIM/EA Unit manager, Agency AIM focal point, EUROCONTROL; Kevin Haggerty, FAA International Program Officer for Europe, Africa, and Middle East;  Hubert Lepori, AIXM Change Control Board, Information Management / Enterprise Architecture Unit, EUROCONTROL; Frank Suykens, Head of Research & Development, Luciad; Ulrich Kaage, Product Manager, Comsoft; Fatimah Madari, SmartAIM Product Manager, Frequentis; Paolo Stefani, Project Manager, IDS and senior representation from SESAR JU; and of course our very own Ian Painter.

If you are heading to ATC Global on the 6^th-8^th March (just over a week away!) then you won’t want to miss Ian’s seminar on SWIM (System Wide Information Management) on Wednesday 7^th March. With the Aviation Thread of the ninth OGC Web Services testbed (OWS-9) set to advance the Aviation Architecture to support several Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) Joint Undertaking (SJU) project requirements as well as the FAA's AIM and SWIM AatS (Aircraft Access to SWIM) requirements Ian will provide an overview of the data/net-centric approach to SWIM using examples from the OGC testbeds we have been involved in. Head to the Seminar Theatre, Hall 9 for 11.30 -11.50 to catch Ian’s seminar.

Make sure you drop by our stand, D519a, to chat with Ian, Debbie or Peter about modernising ATM with open standards. You can also pick up our white paper summary of Ian’s presentation after his seminar on the Wednesday.

So we look forward to seeing you in Amsterdam. You can register for your ATC Global 2012 exhibition and conference tickets at http://www.atcglobalhub.com/register.

See you there!

So last week was an interesting and busy one for me. On Tuesday I was invited to the UK Location Registers & Registries Working Group meeting held at the Environment Agency, Bristol and then presented at the UK Location INSPIRE Data Providers Winter Workshop in London on Thursday. With so much going on here’s my highlights from the two meetings.

UK Location INSPIRE Data Provider Winter Workshop – 9^th Feb 2012

Things are happening!! The INSPIRE Data Provider Winter Workshop was, in my opinion, the best meeting to date that the UK Location and AGI have hosted. It was really good to see lots of new faces in the audience, in particular those organisations that are responsible for the Annex III themes.

The Agenda was a really healthy mix of presentations, ranging from the high-level strategic objectives of the UK Location and INSPIRE to technical sessions demonstrating the tools and applications that are available to support implementation, including:

• Metadata
• Data.gov.uk
• Data Download Services
• Data Transformation

There were several real high points that I took away from the meeting:

1. Implementation Statistics:

• 95% of all identified datasets that fall within the scope of Annex I and II have metadata defined for them       
• Most data providers have also established view services

2. Data.gov.uk:

• New and improved discovery and view application is looking good
• Despite the small team involved, Defra and OS are providing a lot of support to data providers to improve the quality of their metadata and view services

3. INSPIRE Download Services:

• Ian James (OS) gave a great presentation, providing a sneaky peak into the forthcoming Technical Guidelines for the INSPIRE Download Services
• There have been three types of download services initially proposed (these will be extended once the Annex III themes have been finalised):
• Option 1: Atom Feeds for pre-defined datasets
• Option 2: WFS serving pre-defined datasets
• Option 3: WFS serving features (preferred)

Although I didn’t expect that this would be where the Technical Guidelines are heading, I’m actually impressed. And a little relieved - we only need to update our marketing materials not our software as we already support all three of these options. Interestingly, the preferred option,  Option 3, is the easiest of the three download services to implement using GO Publisher.

Keep an eye out on the forthcoming Labs section on our re-vamped website later next month for example videos demonstrating how to configure GO Publisher for setting up Download Services.

4. Transforming data into the INSPIRE Data Specifications:
   It was good to see similarities in the key messages from both presentations that demonstrated how to transform data into the INSPIRE Data Specifications, specifically:

• The data specifications are not as demanding as organisations initially expected
• Time taken to transform data is significantly lower than expected (It took a team of people from Natural England 1 day to transform the Local Nature Reserves dataset into the Annex I Protected Sites theme)
• ransformation and data publication requires input from multiple stakeholders within an organisation

You can see the presentation that I gave describing Snowflake’s approach to data transformation and publication using the Environment Agency Detailed River Network dataset on our SlideShare at:

• Publishing Data into the INSPIRE Data Specifications
• Transforming EA Detailed River Network in to INSPIRE Annex I Hydrography

UK Location Registers & Registries Working Group – 7^th February

After an invitation from Alex Coley, Chair of UK Location Architecture & Interoperability Board I attended the kick off meeting for the UK Location Registers & Registries Working Group. It was a really lively kick off meeting with lots of discussion about the scope of the working group and what UK Location wants to achieve in relation to both INSPIRE and Linked Open Data. Some of the key initial outcomes of the meeting were that the Registers & Registries Working Group will focus on two streams of work:

Firstly – Registers to support the publication of common re-usable resources:

• Namespaces
• Dictionaries of terms (i.e. codelists, vocabularies etc.)
• Coordinate Reference Systems
• Portrayal (styled layer descriptions, symbology)
• Application Schemas (UML/XSD)

These are registers required to underpin INSPIRE and must be established by Member States.

And secondly - Registers that provide a wider framework for managing, discovering and re-using reference objects:

• URI Sets
• Individual spatial object URIs

Again it is exciting to see the UK take the lead in the development of such services as they shall provide the foundation for both INSPIRE and Linked Data.

Tomorrow the team is heading back to University. We’re attending (and sponsoring) the ECS (Electronics and Computer Science) Careers Fair at the University of Southampton and we’re really excited. It’s always great fun meeting up and chatting with the ECS students, finding out what they’re studying and what they want to do after they have finished their studies. As a graduate of Southampton I'm also personally excited to be heading back to Uni for the day.

We’re holding our first TweetUp at 1pm during the event so if you’re an ECS student then make sure you drop by the Careers Fair at 1pm to meet our team at the TweetUp.  AND! If you are one of the first 20 students to show us your tweet of 'I'm at the @ECS_news Careers Fair at @unisouthampton and attending the @sflakesoftware TweetUp' then you could win yourself a small (and yummy!) prize. Make sure you show Ian, Sheila, Niha or me (Cat) your tweet from 1pm onwards for your chance to win*.

So if you’re interested in finding out more about what we do, who we work with, the fun we have, and how you could be part of it all then head to Building 40 (Garden Court), Highfield Campus tomorrow, 7^th Feb, and come and say hello! We'd love to meet with you and hear what you're interested in.

*Only one tweet required. Only one prize per Twitter account. Prizes allocated on first come first served basis. Prize non-transferable

Last week I attended the annual DGI 2012 show held in London at the QEII Conference Centre. With approximately 750 delegates DGI 2012 was the largest in its history. Recently Snowflake has been growing in the Defence and Intelligence space so this show is becoming a must attend for us.   Initially I was just going to attend but a last minute offer to showcase some of our Air Traffic Management testbed work on the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) stand was too good to turn down.

First speaker was Major General Jerry Thomas. Now if ever there was a lesson in public speaking this was it! Major General Jerry Thomas was incredibly animated, passionate and totally owned the stage. No matter what the talk, when you see somebody like this in action it's just fascinating to watch let alone listen. Anyway, his talk on 'Multi Intelligence Support to the Warfighter' was in my opinion one of the best of the conference and contained some classic quotes: "Geospatial is the backbone of intelligence - without it you're a soggy heap on the ground", a nice addition to a Vanessa Lawrence (Director General of Ordnance Survey) quotation "Everything happens somewhere" adding "Everything happens somewhere in the future" referring to intelligence needing to know where and when. But my favourite was "If you don't know where you're going, and what's there when you get there, then there's no point having all the latest shiny kit!". Anyway, enough of the quotes, Major General Jerry Thomas gave a really interesting insight into the changing world of intelligence with the advent of Social media resulting in over 80% of intelligence already being in the public domain on chat rooms, Twitter, Facebook etc. The problem is making sense of it all and here's where 'the' geo-int buzz word comes in, it's all about 'Fusion' (multi-int Fusion to be precise). It's no good gathering all this information, it needs to be broken down and re-assembled in order for it to be meaningful, much like baking a cake - the ingredients on their own taste awful but baked in the right way you have a good end result. Here in the UK our 'geo-int baking' will be performed in the Defence Intelligence Geospatial Fusion Centre which is a new purpose built facility due to open in Summer 2013. 

A couple of quick mentions, John Day, Director of Defence, ESRI gave a talk on utilising Cloud for Geo-Int. Interestingly his talk wasn't a technical one but a financial one. With the defence cuts across the board, John made a really good financial argument for Cloud, stating that Cloud based services could be procured only when required operationally and so could be funded from Operational Expenditure rather than Capital Expenditure making procurement a much less painful process. John also had a great quote: "The definition of Legacy, is that Legacy is the stuff that works".  A quick mention of Barry Barlow from NGA, Barry is Director of Acquisition and showed a live demo on an eAIP (electronic Aeronautical Information Procedure) on an iPad. It was great to see this centre stage as this is something that Snowflake has worked on in the OGC AIM testbeds. In fact we've worked on the next generation of the eAIP so watch this space - I might be up there one day!

Last talk of the plenary was from Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller and she was first class. One of the best talks at a conference I've seen in a long, long time. 'Call me Eliza' she said coming on stage. Eliza was Director General of MI5 from 2002 to 2007 and gave a really insightful talk on her experiences of leading MI5. In the wake of 9/11 MI5 had to radically change and one of her first challenges was to get the government to double MI5's budget, this happened overnight. Now I can't think of any government department ever doing that yet I can see how it got the nod - I for one would definitely not mess with Eliza. Interestingly under her leadership MI5 opened up and for the first time staff could tell there families what they did, in fact staff could actually invite their families in for open days! One point Eliza made was that as Director General of MI5 you are judged not by what you stop but by what you don't stop. With the realisation that not everything can be prevented, to me that makes it one of hardest jobs in the UK.  Eliza also gave some great leadership advice which I do no justice by summarising: look after your staff, go out of your way to encourage ideas, recognise the value of criticism (no matter what your role or experience), don't think you know it all, have humility and finally no matter how serious the situation have fun in what you do!

To round off the plenary was a panel session and Vanessa Lawrence was one of the panel members. Vanessa stated one of the challenges of geo is understanding the users situation. Now I've heard that so many times at various geo shows that it just washed over me at time.  It wasn't until I saw a picture of a soldier up to his neck in a ditch of water with gunfire all around and using a tablet PC to find a way out, then I realised that understanding the users situation and making geo usable can be the difference between life and death.

After a really good morning I did my duty for Open Standards and manned the OGC stand showing off our Aviation testbed work not to mention evangelising GML and all things standards. OGC has done a great job in Defence and Intelligence and sharing the stand with my good friend Steven Ramage (Executive Director, Marketing and Communications) is always a great experience. You can't help but stand back and admire the networking master class Steven gives. If I say so myself Steven and I worked it pretty well, so much so that I didn't manage to get into any of the talks for the rest of the day. During my time on the stand I noticed one passer by go past with a Snowflake Software sponsored Cambridge Conference Exchange bag. With much excitement I just had to grab a quick picture.

Unfortunately Day 2 was pretty much the same and I spent the majority of my time on stand, that said I did make it to Vanessa's talk in the morning to listen to Ordnance Survey's activities for the Olympics.  It's good to see the OS using its considerable geo capabilities to help the Defence and Intelligence community gather the intelligence information required to manage such a huge event. Due to its secure nature it's all a bit behind the scenes but it's clear that for the Olympics a lot of government departments are working together sharing resources and expertise - good to know as I have tickets! Whilst we're talking about Ordnance Survey, its amazing how powerful the OS brand is in this community, unlike other events where there's always a bit of OS bashing going on, you will never hear a bad word said and OS is held in the uttermost regard. Due to it's history you get the feeling that the Defence community have never quite let Ordnance Survey go and they still see it as part of the family.

To sum up ... all in all I'd recommend attending DGI. If you're into geo, geo-int doesn't get a more interesting application and the pace of change in this field is frightening. OGC has a lot of momentum in this space so you can expect open standards to play a big role in opening up the Defence and Intelligence space to a wider community than ever before. See you there next year. In the meantime do what you can to see Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller speak.