Open Geospatial Consortium

Submission Date: 2022-03-04

Approval Date:   <yyyy-mm-dd>

Internal reference number of this OGC® document: 22-001

Category: OGC® Domain Working Group Charter

Authors:   Nils Hempelmann

OGC Climate Resilience DWG

Copyright notice

Copyright © <year> Open Geospatial Consortium

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1. Introduction

This OGC Climate Resilience Domain Working Group (DWG) charter defines a focal point for OGC activities to support achieving climate resilience on a global scale. This Charter is to be presented to the OGC’s Technical and Planning Committees for consideration.

2. Project Scope

The OGC Climate Resilience DWG will provide an open forum for the discussion and presentation of interoperability requirements, use cases, pilots, and implementations of OGC Standards in the context of cross-sector climate actions. Targeted activities will include involve defining, collecting, analyzing, and communicating data streams, building value from raw data through to effective information visualization and interpretation. The scope of the Climate Resilience DWG is support for any action that accelerates our collective readiness to access, fuse, and analyzing data from the climate change modeling community with earth observation or any other type of data relevant for climate action, like social science data, in order to contribute to the global push for achieving climate resilience. The goal of this DWG is to support the development of a reliable foundation for science services that are used in climate change actions.

The OGC Climate Resilience DWG should work in line with the United Nations climate policy frames.

3. Project Description

Climate Resilience Domain Working Group

Operation of an OGC Domain Working Group follows the policies and procedures of the Technical Committee.

  • Problem Statement

Producing and providing reliable climate information requires huge volumes of data to be assembled and processed from different scientific ecosystems - requiring standards and collaboration to support evidence-based decision making. Since the looming challenge of achieving climate resilience is global in nature, spatial aspects must therefore be addressed on a global scale. OGC’s mission of enabling FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data plays a special role in designing Climate Resilience Information Systems. The entire climate information ecosystem around data should adhere to the FAIR principles. In this particular case, climate change services translate scientific data generated by the scientific community into locally relevant information supporting local decision-making. These services combine future climate projections from data modeling centers, remotely sensed data from satellite instruments, and ground measurements from observation networks to create climate products and services tailored to decision-makers' needs. Although the tailoring process is specific to local contexts, all climate change services face similar challenges. This calls for extending the concept of FAIR data to FAIR climate change services. Thus, not only data, but full climate resilience information systems should adhere to the FAIR principles. This requires agreements on metadata aspects for discovery, application programming interfaces (APIs), and resource models for interaction with the climate resilience information system.

Domains are distinct Information Communities that each define a space where:

  • Climate resilience information systems are developed, provided or used;

  • Common data definition, structure, syntax, and definitions exist;

  • A distinct market, application, or business approach exists;

  • Common user requirements exist; and/or

  • A common approach by vendors exists.

The following definition from the Technical Policies and Procedures applies to this DWG Charter:

Domain Working Group: A group (organizationally, a subgroup of the TC) of individuals composed of members of the TC and invited guests, with the specific intent of solving some particular interoperability problem or problems in a particular technology domain for recommendation to the Technical Committee.

Functions of the Climate Resilience DWG are as follows.

  • Provide a forum for discussion and documentation of interoperability requirements for a given information or user community.

  • Provide a forum to discuss, recommend, and document actions related to Interoperability Program Reports.

  • Develop Change Request proposals (CRs) for existing OGC Standards.

  • Develop reports with the goal of approval by the TC for release of these documents as OGC Technical Papers, Discussion Papers, Best Practices, or recommendations.

  • Provide a forum for development of concepts relating to testbed, pilot, and interoperability experiment activities in the climate domain.

  • Host informational presentations and discussions about the use of adopted OGC Standards in line with climate actions.

  • Host software tools in a GitHub organization.

  • Have a formal approved charter that defines the DWG’s Scope of Work and estimated timeline for completion of the work.

  • Have missions and goals defined by the TC.

A DWG Does Not work on Standards submissions, candidate Standards, or revisions to existing OGC Standards. However, a DWG can develop change requests as document interoperability requirements that can then be submitted as work items to a Standards Working Group (SWG).

A DWG may determine that they wish to have public collaboration, such as in teleconference, email discussions, or a public wiki. Voting in DWGs is by simple majority of OGC Members present at the WG meeting, not just Voting TC Members, with the caveat that no OGC Member organization may cast more than one vote in a WG vote.

4. Charter

Everything related to climate resilience is within scope of consideration by this domain working group, with the exception that any work on new OGC Standards relating to climate resilience will be carried out by a SWG chartered expressly for such purpose.

4.1. Charter Members

The initial membership of the Climate Resilience DWG will consist of the following members and individuals with extensive education and experience in the domain issues, namely:

Nils Hempelmann   Open Geospatial Consortium
David Huard       Ouranos
Cameron Wilson    Natural Resources Canada
Ryan Ahola        Natural Resources Canada

4.2. Key Activities

While the scope of this DWG is broad, it will emphasize certain key activities.

  1. Identify and promote a standard set of interfaces and specifications for climate change services;

  2. Monitor the evolution of climate resilience information systems' functional and implementation needs;

  3. Issue Change Requests (CRs) to relevant OGC standards to meet the needs of the domain without sacrificing cross-domain utility; and

  4. Engage with service and technology suppliers of climate change services by means of conferences and workshops.

4.3. Business Case

The Climate Resilience DWG will focus on the interoperability needs to create an ecosystem of climate resilience information systems able to fulfill complex use cases, including interoperability with EO platforms, and further increase the market of spatial climate change services. In particular the DWG will answer the following questions:

  1. Which are the interfaces needed for climate resilience information systems?

  2. Which are the interfaces needed to establish an ecosystem of technical systems, potentially across different administrative domains and how they are related?

  3. Which interoperability issues are present when connecting different technical systems with each other, with EO platforms and with stakeholder’s work environment?

5. Organizational Approach and Scope of Work

Climate Resilience DWG Mission and Role:

The Climate Resilience DWG will concern itself with technology and technology policy issues, focusing on geospatial information and technology interests as related to climate mitigation and adaptation as well as the means by which those issues can be appropriately factored into the OGC standards development process.

The mission of the Climate Resilience DWG is to identify geospatial interoperability issues and challenges that impede climate action, then examine ways in which those challenges can be met through application of existing OGC Standards, or through development of new geospatial interoperability standards under the auspices of OGC.

The role of the Climate Resilience DWG is to serve as a forum within OGC for climate related geo-informatics; to present, refine, and focus interoperability-related climate issues within the Technical Committee; and to serve where appropriate as a liaison to other industry, government, independent, research, and standards organizations active within the domains impacted by climate.

6. Climate Resilience DWG Business Goals

The Climate Resilience DWG will need to establish a set of business goals that frame the basis for determining the nature and type of recommendations made to OGC, framed around the above mentioned business issues. The DWG will be in orientation of the United Nations climate policy frames with respect of their regional or national interpretations and appropriate policies. Examples of the types of discussion for framing goals include the following.

  1. Efforts should focus on working climate resilience issues and problems that result in a net gain for the community.

  2. Minimize technical distinctions between Climate Resilience Information Systems that use geography, as this can lead to artificial barriers that limit the potential of all segments of the information community to come together and fully prosper.

  3. Avoid placing artificial technical barriers on use of data required for climate actions.

  4. Establish the means by which OGC can achieve interoperability and yet preserve the proprietary nature of data.

  5. Define the supporting infrastructure for the community to achieve these goals.

6.1. Activities planned for Climate Resilience DWG:

Activities to be undertaken by the Climate Resilience DWG include but are not limited to:

  1. Identify the OGC interface standards and encodings useful to apply FAIR concepts to climate change services platforms;

  2. Liaise with other OGC Working Groups (WGs) to drive standards evolution;

  3. Promote the usage of the aforementioned standards with climate change service providers and policy makers addressing international regional and local needs;

  4. Liaise with external groups working on technologies relevant to establishing ecosystems of EO Exploitation Platforms;

  5. Liaise with external groups working on relevant technologies;

  6. Publish OGC White Papers, Discussion Papers or Best Practices on interoperable interfaces for climate change services;

  7. Provide software toolkits to facilitate the deployment of climate change services platforms.

7. References