Following on from my pre-event bloggage I thought I'd sum up my thoughts on the three days I spent at the Brussels OGC TC ...
Firstly this TC (Technical Committee) continued the pattern of the last three, more new faces, more content and a bewildering amount of parallel sessions on all things standards. In the last couple of years the OGC has been developing more and more standards and as a result its membership continues to grow (particularly in Europe).

Hosted at EUROCONTROL in Brussels, this OGC TC had a distinct Aviation feel about it, which pretty much kept Debbie and I busy for the first three days. Not just that but this was the first TC that Snowflake sponsored and I'm pretty proud that we were able to do our bit to help our friends at the OGC out.
Starting early Monday morning, I attended a really great session on INSPIRE in the amazing Europa conference hall at EUROCONTROL. For those of you who haven't been to EUROCONTROL, the Europa hall is a small version of the UN voting chamber with the speaker in the middle with rows and rows of attendees sitting in a circle around the speaker. They even have translation booths at the back (note to the EU - I didn't see a Welsh one).
Chaired by Athina Trakas from the OGC, Michael Lutz and Ioannis Kanellopoulos from the JRC INSPIRE team gave an update on the current state of Network Services, Data Interoperability and finally the concept of INSPIRE Compliance. I was due to give a talk on Snowflake's experience of INSPIRE but given the really active discussion and questions there was major overun and my talk got bumped onto the following day at the Europe forum. You can get a copy of my slides on Slideshare.
The discussion during the Monday INSPIRE session was really interesting and included my two biggest issues with INSPIRE:
1) Is a standalone Transformation Service required?
2) What is INSPIRE compliance?
Firstly, in addressing the requirement for the Transformation Service the JRC made it very clear that a standalone Transformation Service is an optional requirement and its up to member states on whether they want to implement such a thing. As long as organisations create data in accordance with the Implementing Rules then it doesn't matter how its done. The JRC team even went as far as saying they don't expect to update the Transformation specification - so in my mind we probably won't see a data transformation service get stood up as every implementation I've seen so far either embeds the transformation inside the Download Service or performs some offline ETL prior to upload to a Download Service. Interestingly, the JRC mentioned that they clarified that exact same question with the UK, which led to a question from the audience asking why clarifications are not made public. I couldn't agree more with this and personally think that this would help greatly to stop the rumor mill.
Secondly, the really tricky subject of INSPIRE compliance. Interestingly this has also come up on the AGI INSPIRE Action Working Group that I sit on. The problem stems from the fact that the INSPIRE Implementing Rules and the Technical Guidance are not normative documents and so organisations can never really know when they have fully met their INSPIRE obligations and achieved the nirvana of INSPIRE compliance. So what is INSPIRE compliance? Is it when your data is valid to an Annex I, II or III schema and your Network Services pass the appropriate OGC compliance tests? Or, is it more than this and includes Data Completeness and not to forget Data Quality? Unfortunately there wasn't anything that really cleared this up and the most common answer seemed to be ...when you adhere to the Implementing Rules. But given that the implementing rules are not normative it looks like INSPIRE compliance can pretty much mean anything you like as long as it's aligned with the Implementing Rules. In my view, this lack of normative compliance is going to have to change otherwise interoperability is going to suffer badly if not fail altogether.
![]()
Okay, onto Aviation. On Monday afternoon I led a two hour session on the Aviation WFS Guidance document that Snowflake (Debbie) has been editing as part of our work in OWS8-AIM testbed. After much deliberation we've now agreed a way forward to make the final changes to the Web Feature Service (WFS) specification in order for it to support the Temporality Model needed for Aviation. Now that all sounds very detailed (and it is) but we're now at the level of ironing out the last remaining issues for the WFS 2.0 specification to be used in an operational context within the the Air Traffic Management (ATM) industry. Given that this is the same standard utilised for INSPIRE that's a great message for OGC: the same data standards, the same service standards but two totally different domains.
On Tuesday morning I did some demos of the 3D Globe Aviation Viewer that Snowflake is developing with the University of Southampton using NASA WorldWind, followed in the afternoon by our first face to face get together of the MOSIA consortium. Led by SINTEF, the MOSIA consortium is a group of companies working as Associate Partners on the Single European Sky ATM Research programme (SESAR Joint Undertaking). For Snowflake, playing one of the lead roles in MOSIA is a massive win for us. We've worked really hard over the last two years to build momentum in the Air Traffic Management (ATM) industry and so being a part of this flagship research programme really puts us in a great place to further develop and grow in the ATM space. We've got some great ideas and I'm really looking forward to getting started in the new year ... should be fun!
Finally on Wednesday, Debbie and I attended the last Aviation DWG session of the TC. Primarily consisting of results from OWS8-AIM testbed Snowflake got quite a few mentions, firstly in the core OWS8 Engineering Report, then in the Single Authoritative Resource Security ER and finally in the AIXM 5.1 Benchmarking Technical Report - note you'll need to be an OGC member to access it. If you're into data compression the benchmarking results were fascinating. Developed by AtosOrigin and Atmosphere, the benchmarking work tested delivering AIXM 5.1 over low bandwith comparing numerous compression techniques namely EXI vs FastInfoSet vs gzip vs WinZip. Now I can't do this excellent piece of work justice in a blog (so please read the report), however, here's my one sentence summary... if you have a small number of coordinates and simple data models then EXI comes out on top, but if you have lots of coordinates and complex models then plain old gzip comes out on top.
For me Wednesday was my last day at the TC, I wish I could have stayed longer but I needed to get back to Snowflake to welcome our new Marketing Manager Cat Stormont. Now Cat seems to be settling in nicely as she's already hassling me for this blog post.
Ian

