OGC seeks public comment for candidate Moving Features Access Standard

Applications using moving feature data, such as vehicles or pedestrians, are rapidly increasing. Innovative applications are expected to require the overlay, integration, and analysis of moving feature data from different sources to create greater social and business value. Examples of applications that require integrated simulation are disaster risk management, traffic information services, security services, navigation for robots, aviation or maritime traffic monitoring, and wildlife tracking and conservation.

The OGC currently maintains two Moving Features Encoding Standards for capturing and managing data describing moving features/objects. While these standards facilitate the ingestion and service of moving feature data, analytics of the content is equally important. The OGC has developed the Moving Features Access candidate standard to provide a framework for analytical operations for moving feature data.

This OGC Standard specifies a set of operations related to trajectory data of moving features. The candidate standard specifies the following operations:

1. Retrieval of feature information. These operations retrieve positions, trajectories, and velocities of a moving feature, for example a car, person, vessel, or aircraft.
2. Operations between TemporalTrajectory and Geometry. These operations form an ‘intersection’ between a geometric object, like a city centre, and the trajectory of a moving feature, like a hurricane.
3. Operations between two TemporalTrajectories. These operations calculate the distance of the nearest approach of a trajectory to another trajectory. For example, the distance between a criminal agent and a police agent for predicting crime patterns.

Collectively, the Moving Features standards provide a framework for describing and evaluating dynamic events using sound geospatial principles to enable interoperability with other geospatial content.

The candidate Moving Features Access Standard is available for review and comment at the OGC online portal. Comments are due by 22 October, 2016.