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

Present:
	•	Ilkka Rinne (IR, Spatineo, chair)
	•	Luis Bermudez (LB, OGC)
	•	Michael Gordon (MG, Ordnance Survey)
	•	Tom Kralidis (TK, Environment and Climate Change Canada/Meteorological Service of Canada)
	•	Chris Little (CL, UK MetOffice)
	•	Cindy Mitchell (CM, natural Resources Canada)
	•	Emmanuel Mondon (EM, AdviceGEO)

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=70176).

The draft  minutes were accepted with no discussion.

3. DWG Charter drafting

IR presented the latest charter text version from the wiki page http://external.opengeospatial.org/twiki_public/QualityOfService/GroupCharter The draft text was discussed chapter by chapter.

Notable comments, discussion and decisions follow:

About the document structure in general:

CL stated that from the MetOffice point of view it’s difficult to see why geospatial services should be different from any other services what comes to quality of service. Therefore the group reflect on what makes geospatial services different, if anything. There is a long history of QoS related techniques and specifications by other standards bodies, such as the W3C. The MetOffice would hope that the outcome of this reflection would be that there is no difference, and thus the group could abolish itself.

MG agreed on the argument that geospatial services are no different from other services, but he disagreed slightly on the analysis of the CL: Based on his experience there is a similar lack of QoS related standardisation also in other web services, such as the ones using the W3C technologies and protocols. The outcome of the work done in this group could be contributed back to the other standards organisations as it’s likely to be applicable to a wider community than the one around the provisioning and using geospatial data. IR added that one of major goals of the QoSE DWG group is providing guidance on how to apply the existing QoS evaluation techniques to the OGC services.

CL noted that linking the W3C’s recent activities on Data on the Web Best Practices and the upcoming work on the Geospatial Data on the Web Best Practices would be useful. CL promised to provide links and group names to link to.

About 1. Introduction

CL: “Transmission delay” seem old fashioned, should be changed to “delay”. MG and IR agreed.

CL: Is it worth adopting ITIL terminology in the charter? MG questioned whether introducing ITIL would create a barrier for the users not familiar with the ITIL process. CL argued that if including the ITIL terms would create a barrier for the OGC members to join, ITIL has a problem. The should look at ITIL terminology and see which parts and be copied and which might need to be adopted.

It was agreed that the ITIL terms and definitions should considered and adopted in the OGC QoSE context provided that they are a good fit.

About 2. Purpose of the Working Group 

CL asked if group intends to put the “U” (for User) in the acronym of the group (QoSUE). Shorter is better. He suggested a shorter new Quality of Service and Experience Domain Working Group, with the proposed acronym QoSE DWG. TK voted for dropping the “User”. CM also said that she would be fine with dropping the  “User” as long a the “Experience” is there. TK also argued that it’s not always clear who the “user” is in the scope of the group’s work.

It was agreed that new proposed name for the Orlando meeting is Quality of Service and Experience DWG.

About the 3.  Problem statement

CL asked whether it was justified to assume that everything in the scope of this group is using HTTP transfer, since the HTTP based protocols are now explicitly mentioned in the charter text. MG noted the group should not restrict itself in HTTP based Web Services, but also include other kind of services in the scope, such as MQTP, Sensor Things and the Internet of Things technologies in general. CL suggested that in the charter, the technical scope of the group should leave the door open for the web services in a wider sense, but in the plan of work, start with the OGC Web Services. MG agreed in this, communication with external working groups would take some time.

LB asked if the quality of data, or semantic quality, should also be included in the group’s scope? CL and MG agreed that the Quality of Experience can certainly be affected by the quality of data, and it would make sense leave the door open for these issues too. IR noted that there is an existing OGC Data Quality DWG, that has the data quality issues in its scope. LB noted that the Data Quality DWG has last met in 2011, so the group is not likely to be active anymore. MG wondered if the reason for apparent abandoning of this work was that there were other, more pressing work to be done for the people involved at the time, or if there were was not very much concern about data quality issues. CL noted that most probable reason would be other work activities of the key people.

CM commented that even though we don’t yet have a very clear picture of what would be the best actions to take and guidance to give regarding the Quality of Experience, including the data quality issues, there is clearly a business case for this kind of research and collaborative action to be started within OGC, and that this group would be a good place to drive this activity.

About 4. Charter

TK asked whether it would be good to add term “automated” in connection with evaluation of QoS and QoE. GM noted that it would be better to keep the group’s scope open for both human-oriented and machine-oriented solutions. 

About 4.2 Key Activities

CM noted that the list of key activities should include designing and collecting commonly agreed metrics for the data providers to self-assess the Quality of Experience of their services and identifying the usability issues that they are not necessarily seeing.

CM had added a comment to this section about qualitative measurement of QoE in addition to the activities focusing on QoS already listed. CL suggested a rating scheme (1-5 stars) for user experience. CM agreed that this kind of rating with well-defined guidance about how to reach each level of quality of experience, in a similar fashion to one used with different maturity models. IR mentioned that this kind of evaluation would probably be related to the recent OGC Geospatial User Feedback (GUF) standard.

About 4.3 Business Case
CM said that she would be able to add a statement or two about the business case from the QoE perspective.

About 5.1 Quality of Service and User Experience DWG Business Goals

CL commented that the QoE would need more visibility in the section, and suggested that the second bullet point would be a good point. IR agreed.

EM noted that it would also be important to be able to describe the business model, IPR and pricing of the services. This is part of the user experience of the service brokers to be able to automatically retrieve, interpret and present this information to the users interesting in accessing data through these services. The current OGC standards allow including only very basic (free text) information about the fees and access restraints for the services. MG said that he would be slightly hesitant to define a detailed format for this kind of information, as the business models and pricing models used by data providers can be very different, but it would still be worth further investigation.

About 5.2 Quality of Service and User Experience DWG: Mission and Role

CL commented that its important also to state what the groups is not going to do, as well as what it intends to do. As examples of these activities he mentioned not reinventing the W3C Data on the Web Best Practices or ITIL, rather the group would use the existing best practices of Data on the Web and established terms for quality of service.

CL noted that it might be worth adding a bullet mentioning identifying gaps in the existing standards and propose new Standards Working Groups as appropriate.

IR will edit the charter text based on the comments made in this meeting. All group members are encouraged to review and add comments to the charter text before the meeting in Orlando.

IR suggested that the group would aim for the Taichung TC meeting in December for proposing the DWG to be formed. CL commented that presenting this in the Taiwan meeting would also be good to getting the attention for this group in Asia.

4. Agenda for the meeting in Orlando TC

IR presented the initial agenda for the Orlando meeting. IR promised to try to reach Michelle Anthony to confirm if she would be interesting presenting the FGDC Status Checker. He also suggested that the main focus of the meeting would be in finalising the charter. TK commented that the FGDC demo would be very useful, demos are always good.

5. Next meeting

The next meeting of the group will be held in Orlando during the TC/PC meeting, on Tue 20th September.

6. Closing

The meeting was closed by IR at 19:40 EEST