Re: Digital Earth and XML (fwd)

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Date: Monday, December 17, 2001 11:22 AM -0500
From: Jeff de La Beaujardiere <address@hidden>
To: Ben Domenico <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: Digital Earth and XML


Ben-

You asked about recent developments in the "Digital Earth" arena.

Digital Earth as a loosely-coordinated international effort is
continuing.  I believe the next international symposium will be in 2003.
The events formerly known as Digital Earth Community Meetings will now
occur under the auspices of the GeoData Alliance
<http://www.geoall.net/>.  There is a transition message on the old DE
website at <http://www.digitalearth.gov/>.

The US Government is focusing specifically on interoperability and
framework data activities.  The interagency Federal Geographic Data
Committee (FGDC) has established a new working group for Geospatial
Applications and Interoperability (GAI) chaired by NASA
<http://gai.fgdc.gov/>.  Secondly, as part of the US Office of
Management and Budget (OMB) e-Government initiative, FGDC is
coordinating work on the "Geospatial One-Stop" portal to a distributed
collection of framework data implemented using interoperability
standards <http://www.fgdc.gov/whatsnew/whatsnew.html#onestop>.

Work on standards themselves is progressing in such arenas as the
OpenGIS Consortium (OGC) Web Services Testbed.  The Web Map Service
(WMS) specification which I edit has just been updated to version 1.1.1.
The Web Feature Service (WFS) 1.0.0 has also been approved.  Both will
appear soon at <http://www.opengis.org/techno/implementation.htm>.
Geography Markup Language (GML) was released last February.  WMS is
being taken up by ISO TC211 as ISO 19128
<http://www.isotc211.org/pow.htm>.

Regarding the use of XML, I can say that the OGC Web Services
specifications make extensive use of XML.  GML is written in XML, and
the services themselves are described in XML.  Future versions of this
metadata will use Web Services Description Language (WSDL)
<http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl>.  We are also considering optional Simple
Object Access Protocol (SOAP) <http://www.w3.org/2000/xp/> request
message encodings as an adjunct to the existing HTTP GET requests.

Happy holidays,
Jeff DLB


     Dr Jeff de La Beaujardiere * Computer Scientist
        NASA Goddard Space Flight Center * Code 933
      address@hidden * +1 301 286 1569
                http://iniki.gsfc.nasa.gov/





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