OGC Invites Developers to its Environmental Data Retrieval API Sprint

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) invites developers to participate in the Environmental Data Retrieval (EDR) API Sprint, held from 18-20 March, 2020, at the NOAA/NWS facilities in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Remote participation is possible.

The EDR API Sprint is a follow-up to the successful MetOcean Weather and Oceans APIs Hack, and will focus on emerging standards for a data-centric Environmental Data Retrieval API. This event is organized jointly with the EDR API Standards Working Group (SWG) and the Meteorology and Oceanography (MetOcean) Domain Working Group (DWG) to advance work of mutual interest to both groups.

OGC has been developing a new generation of web API standards leveraging the OpenAPI specification to document requirements for implementation. Initial API efforts focused on API - Features, and more recently on Coverages, arrays and gridded data. There is also growing interest from users and the community for APIs based on simple data retrieval patterns.

The EDR API SWG and MetOcean DWG have been developing a set of stable data APIs, defined with OpenAPI, to retrieve common data patterns from a relatively persistent data store. These APIs will, in a self-describing way, promote quick and easy access to environmental data. The currently supported data patterns include data at a point in space and time, time series at a point, and 2D/3D polygons. See the EDR API Candidate Specification for more info.

The purpose of this Sprint is to:

1. Attempt to build implementations of the data API service based on existing data, and provide feedback based on the current specifications;

2. develop client-side value-added applications that consume data from UK Met Office and NWS API prototype implementations; and

3. rapid prototyping of other geometry types for the EDR API (grids, profiles and/or trajectories/corridor).

The objectives of this Sprint are to verify and validate requirements and methods for the query and filter operations of the EDR API, develop prototype functionality through running code, and assess the compatibility of the capabilities with the OGC API - Features standard and the in-progress OGC API - Common standard.

An OGC Sprint is a collaborative event driven by rapid code development to implement and test specific capabilities of a technical approach or standard. An example is advancing and testing specific parts of a draft OGC standard. Recent OGC Sprints have advanced the development of OGC API specifications - including OGC APIs for Features, Catalogues, Coverages, and more - by providing the opportunity and environment for the geospatial community to collaborate.