To maintain its place as the premier way of representing spatial information in the Semantic Web, a major update of GeoSPARQL will need to be created to incorporate both ontology constructs that users have found useful but have had to implement elsewhere and, optimally, constructs that will allow for formulaic future extension and the use of GeoSPARQL with related domain ontologies, perhaps such as the OGC & W3C’s Time ontology in OWL [3]. If it can do this, the GeoSPARQL update will assist the OGC in "advancing geospatial location information and services" for the Semantic Web and the related mechanics of Linked Data that are growing in their use.

OGC members themselves are increasingly using Semantic Web approaches to answer questions involving the Internet and Internet data. For example, recent Testbed activity (Testbed 16: Discrete Global Grid System [4]) is considering RDF back-ends and data exchange mechanisms for DGGS implementations. Enhancing the OGC’s own standard for spatial Semantic Web data will therefore assist OGC members to make the most use of spatial + Semantic Web. OGC members will not have to implement their own, non-standard, handling of spatial concept representation not handled by GeoSPARQL.

The larger geospatial community will benefit from the OGC continuing to lead in the spatial + Semantic Web space as this will provide a cohesiveness of approach (standardization) to spatial + Semantic Web, and also the sharing of best practices where community members can learn from early implementers. Also, without this GeoSPARQL enhancement, the geospatial community using the Semantic Web will not have a clear indication that there is a lead body in this field (the OGC) and thus no obvious place to go for community discussion. Seen negatively: if the OGC is not seen to be continuing its leadership in the growth area of the Semantic Web, it will erode its member base as geospatial community members look elsewhere for leadership.

This wider IT community is growing its volumes of spatial data as spatially-enabled devices and services continue to grow. The wider IT community is also expanding its use of the Semantic Web with large-scale initiatives such as schema.org, applying Semantic Web approaches to large numbers of Internet information publishers. Due to these two trends, the combination of spatial + Semantic Web is becoming more mainstream. This means the OGC can potentially grow its membership as new wider IT community members become spatial + Semantic Web community members.

The scope of this proposed SWG is only the revision of the current GeoSPARQL standard. This revision may result in both specific enhancements - to cater for community requirements - and also a revision of the "upper ontology" structuring of GeoSPARQL - to provide direction for future enhancements and alignments with other ontologies.

There are possible alignments of a future GeoSPARQL to other ontologies, perhaps the W3C and OGC’s Time ontology in OWL.

There are possible relationships between a future GeoSPARQL and more spatial referencing systems than were considered by GeoSPARQL 1.0, like Discrete Global Grid Systems (DGGSs).

There are possible alignments of a future GeoSPARQL with advancements in Coordinate Reference Systems that will need to be considered in consultation with related working groups.

Out of scope is work that does not result in a revised GeoSPARQL standard. This includes investigation of property graphs, though coordination with property graph related working groups will be undertaken.

GeoSemantics DWG’s suggestions for spatial ontology investigations:

[x] YES

[ ] NO

The SWG can be inactivated once the final standard has been developed and change requests become minimal or not applicable for consideration. The SWG can be re-activated at any time.

The initial deliverables are based on the initial selection and prioritization of issues from the OGC Standards tracker. This selection will be determined in the first meetings of the working group and subsequently updated in this working group charter.

After deciding on the initial issues to be worked on, this SWG will publish a roadmap to be used to manage scope and timeframes for delivery of a modular revision of the GeoSPARQL standard.

Additional SWG tasks will be added iteratively when new change requests and issues become apparent or gain priority. The SWG is planned as a long term working group so that new change requests may arise during the development of the initial deliverables. These will be prioritized and periodically classified as additional SWG tasks.

The GeoSPARQL SWG will use

It is proposed that the work of this SWG be conducted openly on GitHub, as the work of the motivating GeoSemantics DWG is.

The following standards and projects may be relevant to the SWG’s planned work, although none currently provide the functionality anticipated by this working group’s deliverables. The SWG intends to seek and if possible maintain liaison with each of the organizations that manage these activities.

This proposed SWG is to enhance an existing OGC standard - an ontology - however the Best Practices for ontology publication have changed since the original GeoSPARQL publication. The ontology publication methods of other standards bodies, particularly the W3C who continuously generates new standard ontologies, will be considered to determine appropriate, Best Practice, ontology publication.

This may include the use of tools to automatically generate human-readable ontology versions from the technical ontology artifact, such as those used by inputs to this work, for example the GeoSPARQL Extensions Ontology.

It may also include the description of a next version of GeoSPARQL as a profile (of GeoSPARQL 1.0 and perhaps other ontologies) as well as an ontology, in line with recent work by OGC members and others to establish standard ways of indicating the dependencies between standards, as per The Profiles Vocabulary.

The first meeting of the SWG will be held by telephone conference call at 6AM EDT on the first Thursday immediately following the week of Technical Committee approval of this Charter. Call-in information will be provided to the SWG’s e-mail list and on the portal calendar in advance of the meeting.

The work of the SWG will be carried out primarily by email and conference calls, possibly every two weeks, with face-to-face meetings perhaps at each of the OGC TC meetings.

The following people support this proposal and are committed to the Charter and projected meeting schedule. These members are known as SWG Founding or Charter members. The charter members agree to the SoW and IPR terms as defined in this charter. The charter members have voting rights beginning the day the SWG is officially formed. Charter Members are shown on the public SWG page.