OGC Standards Working Group: IGS-IGM

A major challenge in the world of photogrammetry is data interoperability. I touched on this last week when discussing stereo imagery as a data product, in the context that a practical standard for photogrammetric metadata is inhibiting the adoption of stereo imagery as a data product.

Fortunately efforts are underway at the OGC to resolve the issue. A standards working group for Image Georeferencing Service and Image Georeferencing Metadata was formed late last year to shephard these two draft standards through the standards adoption process. Early drafts were initially submitted in 2006 and have been evolving since then.

At a high level, the Image Georeferencing Service (IGS) refers to a service interface standard for georeferencing (triangulation). Image Georeferencing Metadata (IGM) is a set of schemas that define geopositioning metadata. In the context of a client/server application the input would be non-georeferenced imagery. The service would consume the initial IGM (initial metadata such as sensor name, image names, etc), triangulate the imagery (e.g. provide server-side georeferencing) and then return updated IGM results. In my opinion it makes a lot of sense to develop these two standards instead of implementing proprietary solutions, both for the sake of the mapping community and also for vendors and other organizations that deal with photogrammetric metadata.

Both ERDAS and BAE are participating in the standards working group and we are interested in getting greater participation from the geospatial/photogrammetry community. If you would like to participate, please don't hesitate to get in touch with myself or Dr. Stewart Walker, the IGS-IGM SWG Chair. Also please note that you need to be an OGC member or an employee of a member organization to participate in the SWG.