OWS Quality of Service ad hoc			
15th July 2016 at 6-8 pm Finnish summer time (EEST)
Online using OGC GotoMeeting

Present:
●	Ilkka Rinne (IR, Spatineo, chair)
●	Luis Bermudez (LB, OGC)
●	Rob Dollison (RD,US Geological Survey)
●	Michael Gordon (MG, Ordnance Survey)
●	Tom Kralidis (TK, Meteorological Service, Environment and Climate Change Canada)
●	Matthew Manoussakis (MM, ECMWF)
●	Cindy Mitchell (CM, Natural Resources Canada)
●	Emmanuel Mondon (EM, AdviceGEO)
●	Cheryl Nayyar (CN, NGA)
●	Gordon Plunkett (GP, Esri Canada)
Meeting minutes

1. Opening

The meeting was opened by IR (chair) at 18:05 EEST

2. Approval of minutes of the last meeting

The draft minutes were taken down by IR and were made available in the group's wiki space and in the Meetings folder of the project in the OGC Portal (see https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=69812).

The draft  minutes were accepted with no discussion.

3. Practical issues

IR told that a mailing list ows-qos.adhoc@lists.opengeospatial.org had been created for the ad hoc group. Members should use the subscription within the OGC Portal, non-members subscribe at https://lists.opengeospatial.org/mailman/listinfo/ows-qos.adhoc He reminded that all the future discussion and announcements of the group would be done using the mailing list, so everyone should make sure they've subscribed to the list ASAP.
IR also told that as soon as an SWG or DWG is formed an the list will be migrated to a proper name (and member visibility in the SWG case).

IR brought up that the group, as most other OGC WGs, has two separate work spaces: the project folder in the OGC Portal and the public wiki at http://external.opengeospatial.org/twiki_public/QualityOfService. The Portal folder is generally only visible to OGC members, while the wiki is readable to anyone and editable by any registered user, member or non-member. IR suggested that most of the wiki would be used by default for all the material related to group's work. On the other hand, individual files might be easier to find using a folder structure rather than searching for attachments of particular wiki pages.

LB told that a typical practice for solving this is posting the files, such as meeting minutes and presentations in the group's project folder as public, and linking to them from the relevant wiki pages. It was agreed that this was a good practice to follow for the group's meetings.

4. Use cases for OWS QoS WG

IR quickly presented the list of submitted use cases at http://external.opengeospatial.org/twiki_public/QualityOfService/UseCases. He had also started to identify a list of problem statements based on the use case descriptions the same page.

CM mentioned that while the technical quality of service use cases are important, there are also other needs brought up in the submitted use cases considering usability and user experience of the provided services and applications. The use cases submitted by Natural Resources Canada focus on this quality of experience. While the current OGC technical standards make it possible to provide the spatial web services and applications in a way that makes sense and is usable to the end-users, they do not provide enough guidance for the service and data providers to implement their services in a way that's consistent and easy-to-use.

One possible way to advance the quality of experience could be official OGC documents describing the best practices and check lists that the service providers could use to make sure they have paid enough attention to the user experience issues. TK noted that the OGC candidate standard for Geospatial User Feedback Conceptual Model and XML encoding would probably be relevant for the group's work, especially for the quality of experience related topics.

EM noted that the currently submitted use cases were not provided in the same format, and also that some of them were very technical and some looking the issues from more high-level, user-centered perspective. He asked the group if it would make sense to harmonize and organise the use cases to make them more comparable. IR answered that he would rather leave the format harmonisation and organisation to the phase when the primary use cases are selected and included in the group's charter. TK and CM were also in favour of getting as much of the use cases submitted now and worrying about the format later.

IR asked the group members to keep on submitting the use cases, and contribute to the identified problem statements list in the wiki.

5. QoS of OGC Web Services at the Canadian met service

Tom Kralidis of the Canadian Meteorological Service presented the use cases of their organisation related to the monitoring of the availability and operational status of their OGC Web Services. The presentation consisted of an overview the meteorological data dissemination challenges, the OoS drivers and an online demo of the quality of service monitoring tool used operationally at the Canadian Met Service.

IR asked TK which parts of the presented system would he feel that would benefit from technical standardisation at the OGC level. According to TK the conceptual model and possibly format of the test result reports would be an interesting candidate for harmonisation. He mentioned that the FGDC Service Status Checker used to include an XML Schema for this kind of test reports, but he was not sure if the project was still active. RD said that the project was active again, and that he could try to find more information about the reporting format used. GP also noted that they had been using the FGDC Service Status Checker.

LB mentioned that the CITE team had recently started using W3C Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) for describing the results of test results in Team Engine. EARL might also be useful in the scope of the QoS testing.

EM noted that the web service market place application related to the EU Copernicus programme he's involved has intention to implement quality of service testing as a service, and possibly a QoS certification scheme for the included services.

6. Updated results of the survey

IR noted that the total number of responses were 9, with two more since the lat meeting on 5th July. The survey still open at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSflY9McTo-emjio4Wvbp-EPJXGTee6illsEZb4JjENPamgsKw/viewform?c=0&w=1 and an offline participation is also possible using a spreadsheet available in the wiki at http://external.opengis.org/twiki_public/QualityOfService/QualityOfServiceSurvey

IR proposed that the results of the survey would be presented in the face-to-face group meeting during the Orlando TC.

7. WG Charter drafting

The general timeline of the ad hoc group's work and actions towards forming an official OGC WG was discussed. CN proposed that we should be able to create a draft version of the group charter ready for discussion in Orlando TC meeting in September. It was agreed that this was a good and realistic goal.

IR mentioned that in order to write the charter, the group would have to make at least an initial decision about the type of the proposed working group. If the immediate goal of the group would be a new OGC technical standard or extensions to the existing ones, forming a Standards Working Group (SWG) for this work would probably make the work more straight forward compared to forming a Domain Working Group (DWG): A DWG cannot draft or propose new standards by itself, but would need to get one or more SWGs activated to do this work. On the other hand an DWG could more easily encompass a wider scope and function about discussing both the more technical quality of service and the more user-oriented quality of experience issues.

MG favoured proposing a DWG, and letting the SWGs for particular standards decide about including the QoS extensions to their standards. He argued that it would be awkward for the QoS SWG to create a specification including QoS requirements for the existing standards. IR agreed, but also noted that it would be good to have a common conceptual model, and possibly even common XML Schema implementations of it for all the OGC Web Service standards combined with service type specific bindings. It would make sense for these common models to be created and maintained by a single SWG. MG agreed that the conceptual model for QoS would be a valid reason to for an SWG.

EM brought up the issue of involving people outside the OGC, such as the the W3C, and asked LB if it would make any difference for their involvement if the group would be an DWG or SWG. LB replied that while he would have to check it, he thought that the memorandum of understanding between the OGC and W3C would allow the W3C experts to participate in the OGC working groups regardless of the chosen group type.

EM was also concerned that the quality of experience issues would not get enough attention in a SWG, because of focusing to technical issues. This might lead into missing the input of non-technical people. For this reason he would prefer a DWG. CM also stressed the importance of the quality of experience, but said that their organisation would strongly support forming either SWG or DWG. Both TK and CN said that they would prefer a DWG over SWG to better cover both the QoS and QoE topics.  

LB mentioned that if the group decides to propose a DWG in the first phase, an additional SWG could always be proposed later for cover more focused technical problems, such as the QoS capabilities.

Based on the discussion it was decided that the charter drafting would be continued with the goal of proposing a new Domain Working Group for the Quality of Service and Quality of Experience of OGC Web Services.

IR will copy the DWG charter template content in a wiki page and the initial charter drafting work will be done there by the group members. The deadline for the first complete charter draft was set to the Orlando TC.

IR listed the individuals who've expressed a wish to be a charter member by the start of the meeting:
●	Ilkka Rinne (Spatineo),
●	Tom Kralidis (Environment and Climate Change Canada/Meteorological service of Canada),
●	Emmanuel Mondon (AdviceGeo), 
●	Michael Gordon (Ordnance Survey)
●	Cindy Mitchell (Natural Resources Canada)

Ilkka Rinne and Tom Kralidis have volunteered as candidates for the group chair and co-chair. IR asked people interested in becoming a charter member or a co-chair to send email to him.

8. Next meeting(s) and actions

IR noted that he will be out-of-office from 18th July to 12th August, and thus unable to hold or participate to the group meetings during this time period. Since there is no pressing need to get particular work done before the three-week deadline of the Orlando TC on 26th August, it was decided that the next online meeting will be held on week 33 or 34 after a common holiday of 15th August. IR will post a Doodle for the date and time.

Actions:

●	IR: Reserve a meetings slot for OWS QoS ad hoc in the Orlando TC.
●	IR: copy the DWG charter template to wiki.
●	IR: create a Doodle for the next meeting time.
●	All: Submit use cases and problem statements to wiki.
●	All: Start working on the charter content in the wiki.
●	All: Participate in the survey if not already done so.
●	All: consider if you want to be a charter member or co-chair.
●	LB: check the MoU between OGC and W3C for expert cross participation.

9. Closing
The meeting was closed by Ilkka Rinne at 19:55 EEST