The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) Members approved “OGC OpenSearch Geo and Time Extensions” as an OGC standard. This document defines an extension to the popular OpenSearch specification so that users can easily take advantage of rich geospatial and temporal search capabilities enabled by OGC standards. OGC OpenSearch Geo and Time Extensions can be downloaded from http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/opensearchgeo.
OpenSearch (http://www.opensearch.org) provides a standard way of describing search engine capabilities so that they can be leveraged by search client applications such as modern Web browsers. The OGC® OpenSearch Geo and Time Extensions standard provides a very simple way to configure OpenSearch for spatial and temporal queries over distributed repositories of contents having geographic and time properties, and for syndication of these search results in one large index.
Digital resources are becoming more complex and diverse, and this is especially true with respect to sensor data (including Earth images) and Web connected sensors (including webcams). Such data is increasingly becoming discoverable and usable through open interfaces that implement OGC standards (http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards), but most of this data remains undiscoverable via popular search engines. The OGC OpenSearch Geo and Time Extensions candidate standard specifies how to enhance search engines and configure them to access spatial data servers. Such enhancement enables users of similarly enhanced web browsers and other web applications to query resource URLs through search combinations of time extents, geographic areas or location names, and likely keywords.
The OGC OpenSearch Geo and Time Extensions standard includes work undertaken within the GENESI-DR (Ground European Network for Earth Science Interoperations – Digital Repositories) project funded by the 7th Framework program of the European (EC Grant Agreement no. 212073) and the follow-up project GENESI-DEC (Ground European Network for Earth Science Interoperations – Digital Earth Community) funded by the same program (Contract nº RI-261623). The document was further supported by the European Space Agency (ESA) Heterogeneous Missions Accessibility (HMA) initiative and related projects.
All OGC standards are free and publicly available.
The OGC is an international consortium of more than 475 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.
