PROPOSED Spatial Data on the Web Working Group Charter

The mission of the Spatial Data on the Web Working Group is to:

W3C Members join the Spatial Data on the Web Working Group; OGC Members should contact the Chairs or Staff Contact to join the relevant OGC Working Group.

This proposed charter is available on GitHub. Feel free to raise issues.

Charter Status See the group status page and detailed change history.
Start date [dd monthname yyyy] (date of the "Call for Participation", when the charter is approved)
End date [dd monthname yyyy] (Start date + 2 years)
Chairs Luis de Sousa (ISRIC)
Rob Atkinson (OGC)
Team Contacts Bert Bos (0.1 FTE)
Meeting Schedule Teleconferences: weekly
Face-to-face: The WG will meet in conjunction with the relevant OGC Working Group(s) during OGC's Member Meetings (up to 3 per year).
Optionally during the W3C's annual Technical Plenary week.
additional face-to-face meetings may be scheduled by consent of the participants, usually no more than 3 per year

Motivation and Background

Background of landscape, technology, and relationship to the Web, users, developers, implementers, and industry.

[Under development in GitHub pull request 534.]

Scope

The Spatial Data on the Web WG will:

Out of Scope

  • Specifications that are not directly supported by OGC Standard Working Groups.
  • Best Practices that are not directly supported by OGC Domain Working Groups.

Deliverables

Updated document status is available on the group publication status page.

Draft state indicates the state of the deliverable at the time of the charter approval. Expected completion indicates when the deliverable is projected to become a Recommendation, or otherwise reach a stable state.

Normative Specifications

The Working Group will deliver the following W3C normative specifications:

  • Semantic Sensor Network Ontology - new edition of core and extension parts.
    • Draft state: Adopted (core)
    • Expected completion: Q4 2024 (core)
    • OGC SWG: Observations, Measurements, and Samples SWG
    • Latest publication: 2017-10-19
    • Abstract:

      The Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) ontology is an RDFS/OWL ontology for describing observations made by sensors implementing specified procedures, the studied features of interest and the observed properties, along with samples used in the observations and the sampling activities that created them, as well as actuations which follow a similar semantics and data structure.

      The SOSA vocabulary (Sensors, Observations, Samples and Actuations) contains the core terms and definitions from SSN, packaged for use in general applications.

      Additional parts of this ontology will be published as separate recommendations. At time of charter these are expected to include:

      • ObservableProperties model
      • JSON-LD binding for OGC API Features JSON

      Alignments with some related ontologies and data models are included in the recommendation.

The following existing specifications are potentially in scope for maintenance:

Other Deliverables

Other non-normative documents may be created such as:

  • RDF artefacts including testing and validation tools (e.g. JSON-Schema, SHACL Shapes)
  • Test suite and implementation report for the specifications
  • Primer or Best Practice documents to support web developers when designing applications
  • OGC Discussion Papers
  • OGC Technical Papers
  • W3C Notes

Timeline

Put here a timeline view of all deliverables.

  • Month YYYY: First teleconference
  • Month YYYY: First face-to-face meeting
  • Month YYYY: Requirements and Use Cases for FooML
  • Month YYYY: FPWD for FooML
  • Month YYYY: Requirements and Use Cases for BarML
  • Month YYYY: FPWD FooML Primer

Success Criteria

In order to advance to Proposed Recommendation, each normative specification is expected to have at least two independent interoperable implementations of every feature defined in the specification, where interoperability can be verified by passing open test suites, and two or more implementations interoperating with each other.

There should be testing plans for each specification, starting from the earliest drafts.

Consider adopting a healthy testing policy, such as: To promote interoperability, all changes made to specifications in Candidate Recommendation or to features that have deployed implementations should have tests. Testing efforts should be conducted via the Web Platform Tests project.

Each specification should contain sections detailing all known security and privacy implications for implementers, Web authors, and end users.

For specifications of technologies that directly impact user experience, such as content technologies, as well as protocols and APIs which impact content: Each specification should contain a section on accessibility that describes the benefits and impacts, including ways specification features can be used to address them, and recommendations for maximising accessibility in implementations.

This Working Group expects to follow the TAG Web Platform Design Principles.

Coordination

For all specifications, this Working Group will seek horizontal review for accessibility, internationalization, privacy, and security with the relevant Working and Interest Groups, and with the TAG. Invitation for review must be issued during each major standards-track document transition, including FPWD. The Working Group is encouraged to engage collaboratively with the horizontal review groups throughout development of each specification. The Working Group is advised to seek a review at least 3 months before first entering CR and is encouraged to proactively notify the horizontal review groups when major changes occur in a specification following a review.

Additional technical coordination with the following Groups will be made, per the W3C Process Document:

In addition to the above catch-all reference to horizontal review which includes accessibility review, please check with chairs and staff contacts of the Accessible Platform Architectures Working Group to determine if an additional liaison statement with more specific information about concrete review issues is needed in the list below.

W3C Groups

Web of Things Working Group
Building blocks (e.g., metadata and APIs) that enable easy integration across IoT platforms and application domains.
Dataset Exchange Working Group
Spatial Data has specific needs for data description, such as coordinate reference system, granularity. These must be taken into account by the DXWG.
Devices and Sensors Working Group
Sensor and system descriptions.

OGC Groups

Most working groups operating at OGC have a scope that may intersect with topics of interest discussed in the Spatial Data on the Web Working Group. The OGC Architecture Board (OAB), comparable to the W3C Technical Advisory Group (TAG) will provide high level guidance to the Spatial Data on the Web Working Group. The Working Group expects to liaise with OGC groups as needed, and more specifically with:

Observations, Measurements, and Samples SWG
Standards-based exchange of observed, measured, or modeled data.
Timeseries Markup Language SWG
Timeseries profile of Observations
GeoDataCube SWG
Standards for APIs and metadata relating to multi-dimensional data collections.
Observations, Measurements, and Samples SWG
Standards-based exchange of observed, measured, or modeled data.
GeoSPARQL SWG
GeoSPARQL contains a small spatial domain OWL ontology that allow literal representations of geometries to be associated with spatial features and for features to be associated with other features using spatial relations.
Connected Systems SWG
Linking work on SSN in W3C with the open interfaces for sensor web applications developed at OGC.
SensorThings SWG
Linking work on SSN in W3C with the OGC SensorThings API.
GeoDCAT SWG
Linking the W3C and OGC work on dataset description and profiles.
GeoPose SWG
Direction alongside location for sensors, systems and platforms
Geosemantics DWG
Umbrella group in OGC for geospatial semantics applications

External Organizations

[other name] Working Group
[specific nature of liaison]

Participation

To be successful, this Working) Group is expected to have 6 or more active participants for its duration, including representatives from the key implementors of this specification, and active Editors and Test Leads for each specification. The Chairs, specification Editors, and Test Leads are expected to contribute half of a working day per week towards the Working Group. There is no minimum requirement for other Participants.

The group encourages questions, comments and issues on its public mailing lists and document repositories, as described in Communication.

The group also welcomes non-Members to contribute technical submissions for consideration upon their agreement to the terms of the W3C Patent Policy.

Participants in the group are required (by the W3C Process) to follow the W3C Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.

Communication

Technical discussions for this Working Group are conducted in public: the meeting minutes from teleconference and face-to-face meetings will be archived for public review, and technical discussions and issue tracking will be conducted in a manner that can be both read and written to by the general public. Working Drafts and Editor's Drafts of specifications will be developed in public repositories and may permit direct public contribution requests. The meetings themselves are not open to public participation, however.

Information about the group (including details about deliverables, issues, actions, status, participants, and meetings) will be available from the Spatial Data on the Web Working Group home page.

Most Spatial Data on the Web Working Group teleconferences will focus on discussion of particular specifications, and will be conducted on an as-needed basis.

This group primarily conducts its technical work pick one, or both, as appropriate: on the public mailing list public-sdw-wg@w3.org (archive) or on GitHub issues. The public is invited to review, discuss and contribute to this work.

The group may use a Member-confidential mailing list for administrative purposes and, at the discretion of the Chairs and members of the group, for member-only discussions in special cases when a participant requests such a discussion.

Decision Policy

This group will seek to make decisions through consensus and due process, per the W3C Process Document (section 5.2.1, Consensus). Typically, an editor or other participant makes an initial proposal, which is then refined in discussion with members of the group and other reviewers, and consensus emerges with little formal voting being required.

However, if a decision is necessary for timely progress and consensus is not achieved after careful consideration of the range of views presented, the Chairs may call for a group vote and record a decision along with any objections.

To afford asynchronous decisions and organizational deliberation, any resolution (including publication decisions) taken in a face-to-face meeting or teleconference will be considered provisional. A call for consensus (CfC) will be issued for all resolutions (for example, via email, GitHub issue or web-based survey), with a response period from one week to 10 working days, depending on the chair's evaluation of the group consensus on the issue. If no objections are raised by the end of the response period, the resolution will be considered to have consensus as a resolution of the Working Group.

All decisions made by the group should be considered resolved unless and until new information becomes available or unless reopened at the discretion of the Chairs.

This charter is written in accordance with the W3C Process Document (Section 5.2.3, Deciding by Vote) and includes no voting procedures beyond what the Process Document requires.

Patent Policy

This Working Group operates under the W3C Patent Policy (Version of 15 September 2020). To promote the widest adoption of Web standards, W3C seeks to issue Web specifications that can be implemented, according to this policy, on a Royalty-Free basis. For more information about disclosure obligations for this group, please see the licensing information.

Licensing

This Working Group will use the W3C Software and Document license for all its deliverables, with copyright held by OGC and W3C. Published documents will be clearly marked as joint deliverables.

About this Charter

This charter has been created according to section 3.4 of the Process Document. In the event of a conflict between this document or the provisions of any charter and the W3C Process, the W3C Process shall take precedence.

Charter History

Note:Display this table and update it when appropriate. Requirements for charter extension history are documented in the Charter Guidebook (section 4).

The following table lists details of all changes from the initial charter, per the W3C Process Document (section 4.3, Advisory Committee Review of a Charter):

Charter Period Start Date End Date Changes
Initial charter 19 October 2021 04 October 2023
Extension 04 October 2023 04 April 2024
Rechartered [dd monthname yyyy] [dd monthname yyyy]

[description of change to charter, with link to new deliverable item in charter] Note: use the class new for all new deliverables, for ease of recognition.

Change log

Changes to this document are documented in this section.