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.

Following the recent launch of our new online training portal, we are is pleased to announce that our special introductory offer for the Online GML Fundamentals course sold out in less than 48 hours. As part of our 10 year anniversary celebrations, Snowflake offered a special 10 for 10 for 10 promotion enabling 10 people to take the new course for just £10. We donated all proceeds from the sell-out offer to Soft Power Education, an NGO that supports health and education projects in Busoga, Uganda.

The Snowflake GML course is the only self-paced, online GML Fundamentals training course available worldwide which takes registrants through a modular framework allowing them to work at their own speed and fit training around their requirements. Led by our in-house GML Trainer, Ballal Joglekar, the course is designed to be truly interactive with audible in-depth explanations and end of module quizzes enabling self assessment of learning objectives. Importantly, students benefit from CPD credits on completion of the AGI accredited course.

“The Online GML Fundamentals course makes GML training accessible to anyone, anywhere. It gives employees and organisations additional choice and flexibility for learning”, explains Ballal Joglekar. “Following our experience in providing interactive ‘classroom’ style training we have designed the online course to go beyond traditional ‘e-learning’ slides by incorporating voice over explanations, interactive diagrams and quizzes to engage students and enable them to assess their own progress.”

Sheila Drake, Training Manager at Snowflake comments “The training is available 24/7, to a worldwide audience, expanding our mission to support the industry in the use of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard, GML. When training and travel budgets are being reduced, online training such as ours is an efficient and affordable option for continued professional development.”

“The GML Fundamentals course is just the first of our popular training courses to be made available in this self learning, online format, with additional courses being made available as part of the online training portal during 2012,” continues Sheila Drake.

Following the 10 for 10 for 10 promotion, we received excellent feedback on the quality and accessibility of the course including that the format is “very easy and clear to use” and that “being able to do self-paced stuff is great.”

The Online GML Fundamentals course is available to purchase online, with a credit/debit card, for the regular retail price of £250 (ex VAT) and can be started immediately.

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

As you know Snowflake is a big fan of the Open Geospatial Consortium and all things standards. Snowflake has been a member of the OGC since 2002 and we've pretty much attended at least two of the four Technical Commitee meetings (TCs) each year since then, not to mention the 8 OWS Testbeds we've worked on.  

The next TC is a little different for us at Snowflake as we're sponsoring it! Hosted at the EUROCONTROL headquarters in Brussels the November TC has a packed  Agenda. As you'd expect, firstly there's plenty of Aviation on the agenda: there's two meetings of Aviation Domain Working Group and there's an Aviation focused Interoperability Day on the Friday.  On the Monday afternoon, Snowflake is leading the discussion on the WFS profile for Aviation that we authored as part of our OWS8-AIM work.  

Outside of Aviation there are open sessions on INSPIRE, The Internet of Things and the Digital Agenda for Europe and in parallel to those sessions are the meetings of standards in the making. There are two types of meetings at a TC: Standards Working Groups (SWG) and Domain Working Groups (DWG). SWGs are the nitty gritty of standards and in order to attend an SWG you need to be registered beforehand, DWG's are more open groups and tend to focus more on best practice, outreach and discussion around a particular domain. 

If you haven't been to a TC before, its worth a trip. That said, it takes a while to get used to a TC and I'd definite recommend attending the new member orientation on the Monday . The OGC membership is full of some great thought leaders and at times the discussion can get very heated and down in the micro detail.  OGC members are passionate about standards which for a newbie can be a little bemusing, that said this is what these meetings are all about ... to work through the detail so that when a standard hit the streets its well thought through a fit for purpose.

Debbie and I will be in attendance next week so please do catch up with us

Registration is now open, so you can register here

Yep, we've had enough. We've been working hard for 10 years and now we're all having a day off this Thursday and closing the office!

No Sales, No Support, No Consultancy, No Accounts, No Training and you know something is definitely up when there's NO CODING going on in Snowflakeland.  Yes for one day only we're downing all our tools so all you'll find at Snowflakeland is tumbleweed rolling down the open plan.

To celebrate Snowflake's 10 year anniversary the entire company is having a day off together. We could lie and say its a team building exercise or some master strategy day. But its not! We're just all going to head out, do some cool things together and have some beers and good food along the way! As for what we're going to do ... well I'm afraid I can't tell you! Myself and the Office Management team (Sonia and Sheila) have been keeping the days activities a secret from the wider Snowflake team. 

Curious???? Well I'll give you some criptic clues ...

1) We'll be wearing some interesting gear;

2) Taking a vote on a few things;

3) Eating some very rare food (there's only 1 restaurant serving this type of food in the whole UK);

4) Finally we will end the day with a 'little' tour

On the day you'll get to find out as we have strict orders from Marketing to make sure we keep Facebook and Twitter up to date.

I hope you don't mind us all taking a day off, after all it is our first day off in 3673 days of business. During that time we've worked really hard to look after all of our customers.

Come Friday we'll be back to normal ... that said its probably best to phone about 10am onwards as we may be a little thick headed in the morning!

Ian