GeoBliki's Blog

SensorWeb 2.0 2008 R&D 100 Award Winner

Patrice Cappelaere — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 01:07:00 +0000

It is official: SensorWeb 2.0 has been recognized as one of the most technologically significant products introduced in the marketplace over the past year by the independent judging panel and editors of R&D Magazine.

The Award ceremony will take place Oct 16, 2008 in Chicago. This is a huge effort. We have some big contributors on the team including NASA GSFC, Ames, JPL and universities such as Maryland, George Mason, UAH…and let’s not forget Northrop Grumann. Congratulations to all.

Thanks to the Open GeoSpatial Consortium’s help with standard development. This is tedious work but nonetheless important.

This is far from being over for us though. The next step is to integrate DOD and civilian assets into a larger cross-domain Sensorweb for emergency response. We have a big demo coming in October… Stand-by for more later.

Working together through seamless interoperability, we can make a difference and save lives.

This would not have been possible without the precursor effort at the Naval Research Laboratory with the Virtual Mission Operations Center (VMOC) designed to support what is known today as the Operational Responsive Space. Thanks to Greg Glaros, the visionary at the Office of Force Transformation now heading Synexxus, and Michael Hurley at NRL.

From Geo- to Flow-enabling the Web

Patrice Cappelaere — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:06:00 +0000

It finally happened! The WfMC and the OGC just signed a Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU) to cooperate in advancing standards-based, interoperable work flow and Web-enabled geospatial content sharing, modeling and visualization to address the needs of their members.

This is a big deal for WfXML and our RESTful approach to workflow management. OGC has been very successful in standard development through continuous interoperability demonstrations and pilot programs. So you will see more news in the near future.

As part of this MOU, we will continue the integration of RESTful Workflows (WfXML) with XPDL, BPMN as well as other OGC standards to power the NASA SensorWeb with many of the OGC and WfMC organizational members.

Please, Come and Join us. This is going to be fun!

Architecture & Process: What was WfXML-R doing at that conference?

Patrice Cappelaere — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 21:46:00 +0000

Since Sandy Kemsley asked the question, I will try to attempt to explain this a second time.

Architecture & Process 2008 is a great avenue to expose users & architects to new key technologies.

Enterprise Architecture and current BPM initiatives are pretty much based on a SOAP-based architecture. This is a wonderful high-octane technology, if you and your pit crew can afford it. But this is reserved to an elite group targeting a niche market: Corporate America 500 that can afford it.

WfXML-R targets that rest of the market (or the remaining 80% of it) with a simpler approach based on several Web 2.0 standards and protocols including Atom/AtomPub, GData, OpenSearch and OpenID/OAuth to manage user authentication, secure transactions and user authority delegation to workflows. The last two standards were the final keystones to a RESTful architecture that can be used at the Enterprise level.

So what is this doing at this Conference? Hummmmm????

An RESTful interoperable and non-proprietary standard sponsored by the WfMC and the OpenGeoSpatial Consortium will be a huge achievement for this Community.

The OGC demonstrated three interoperable workflow engines during OWS-5 using WfXML-R inclusing OpenWFE and a BPEL engine. Hitachi Interstage and the SUNGARD Carnot may very well be next based on discussions we had this week.

It is at least satisfying that some other people such as Jason Woodruff got it right away and seem pretty excited about it. And yes, Jason, Interface 3 could be another one that ought to be included. But not this time! BPAF is next and I will let Michael zur Muelhen announce it very soon :).

RESTful WfXML accepted by the WfMC

Patrice Cappelaere — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 01:13:00 +0000

After three days working with the WfMC technical committee in Washigton DC this week, Wf-XML will hopefully get its official RESTful bindings very soon. Keith Swenson has been extremely supportive and enthusiastic about the effort. We will probably see the Fujitsu Interstage engine sporting the new bindings following closely the efforts on the SUNGARD Carnot engine led by Michael zur Muehlen and Phil Hansen at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ. There are rumors of a possible interoperability bake-off to be announced in a few months…Hummmm…Stand-by!

An intersting question came up. How do you explain the difference between SOAP and REST in less than 30 seconds without using any technical terms?

Let’s try this metaphor:

Toyota Camry: Great american favorite, inexpensive, easy to drive, low maintenance, last forever… You can pass it on to your kids.

Toyota Indy complete with Pit Crew Support – High technology, exciting, cool, expensive, needs that crew. Is this for your market?

Is this getting close?

New WfXML-R Prototype Effort at the Stevens Institute

Patrice Cappelaere — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 13:31:00 +0000

As part of his Bachelor Thesis “The application of Wf-XML to scientific workflow: a satellite imaging case study” Philipp Hansen is currently working with us on a proof of concept prototype for WfXML-R at the Stevens Institute of Technology. His advisor there is Michael zur Muehlen.

He is following a two step approach. First step is the implementation of a WfXML-R interface for Sungard’s Carnot Workflow Engine, which already features the ASAP-based Wf-XML for workflow interoperability. This implementation will be tested with scientific workflows within NASA sensor web environment.

The second step is publishing and discovery of available workflows via APP according to the current WfXML-R version.

This will be the fourth implementation of WfXML-R for RESTFul Workflow Engines.

Join the goup

OWS-5 Interoperability Demo

Patrice Cappelaere — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:17:00 +0000

St Louis, Mar 28, 2008

Just completed a full week of OGC meetings in St Louis. This is the conclusion of OWS-5 (OGC Web Services Interoperability Demo #5) with more than 30 participants.

The NASA SensorWeb is deeply involved in Earth Observation, Natural Resources & Environment. We presented our current ROA-based architecture used to support many pilots and operational demonstrations.

Flip through the presentation on Slideshare and

Watch the first 7mn video here

or this one here as a more technical oriented version (10mn .mov)

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GeoBliki in Sensors Magazine

Patrice Cappelaere — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 03:07:00 +0000

A great article from Sam Bacharach published in Sensors Magazine. The OGC SensorWeb Enablement is picking up some steam. We are greatly appreciative to NASA, one of our sponsors.

The OGC interoperability demonstrations such as OWS-4 and OWS-5, are crucial for standard adoption. As mentioned in the article, our focus for OWS-5 is in enterprise workflow scenarios (geobpms) for national or international emergency response such as fires or floods.

OAuth 1.0 for Geobliki

Patrice Cappelaere — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:04:00 +0000

Warning! Your web access to http://eo1.geobliki.com might be declined.

Security has been tightened up for the RESTful OGC Services.

Done as part of OWS-5 interoperability experiment for RESTful services, OAuth 1.0 has been implemented as our security protocol between consumer applications and our web services (sps, wfs, sos). We have made an additional assumption that users could pre-grant access to consumers such as workflows to allow for unattended operations to simplify the protocol one step further. For more information, go to: http://eo1.geobliki.com/pages/oauth

WfXML-R

Patrice Cappelaere — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 14:59:00 +0000

Workflow interoperability is a major concern for the OGC and the WfMC. A simple and RESTful API is critical for early adoption. With the help of John Mettraux of OpenWFE fame, Matt Zukovsky, Keith Swenson and many others, we are documenting this effort dubbed WfXML-R leveraging many years of work done by Keith and the WfMC group.

We need some help and early adopters. Continuous feedback to the nascent specification would be appreciated.

Subscribe to WfXML

Email:

Visit this group

Workflows, RESTful OGC Services and Identity 2.0

Patrice Cappelaere — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 15:33:00 +0000

Generating just-in time data products for first responders require the chaining of many web services using workflows.

Our interesting challenge is multi-fold. First responders from various organizations will need access to data provided by other organizations in case of emergencies. Single sign-on is a must. Trusted relationships between organizations is critical to grant access of sensitive data or assets to remote users in a seamless manner.

Access profiles may need to be exchanged at login to determine the access rights of those incoming users.

With the OGC, we are working on RESTful APIs for SensorWeb Enabled Data Nodes. Fairly sophisticated workflows will access remote web services to task satellites, process the data and deliver custom products to the end-users. This needs to be done securely on behalf of the end-users that may grant temporary or permanent access to costly resources to those workflows.

As part of OWS-5, we will be demonstrating that capability fairly shortly. This will require the tight integration of Identity standards such as OpenID 2.0 and the emerging OAuth.

This is part of our effort to provide a simpler but secure resource oriented architecture (ROA) that will scale up to support a broader community in a federated environment.

Transforming Disruption into Advantage (TM)

Patrice Cappelaere — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 21:22:00 +0000

This is the trademark of Transformation + Innovation. i had the priviledge to present a few slides during a breakfast presentation on a RESTful WfXML: A User Centric Resource-Oriented Approach to Workflows as they apply to the orchestration of OGC services with some examples taken during the recent South California fires.

A very interesting talk from Dennis Wisnosky, CTO of the DoD Business Mission Area on Agile Architectures…talking about a challenge for DoD!

This current work is sponsored by the OGC (as part of OWS-5) and NASA. It is also getting a lot of attention from the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) as a complementary approach to the existing SOAP-based WfXML API for Workflow Interoperability.

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Unmanned aerial vehicles and images from space: Is this the future of firefighting?

Patrice Cappelaere — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 18:56:00 +0000

NASA's High-Tech Wildfire Weapons

Patrice Cappelaere — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 12:14:00 +0000

Article in cnn.com/technology

Updated 1:55 p.m. EDT, Fri October 26, 2007

“It’s kind of like going to the weather channel for fire,” says Dan Mandl, the EO-1 mission manager at NASA. “Every sensor in the world becomes a data feed, and we’re using RSS technology [so] anyone can locate and subscribe to it.”

Instead of having people intercept the data, the process has become automated, which speeds up the information-gathering process, Mandl says. An image from the EO1 used to take two weeks to analyze, but the first images from the fire in Southern California were analyzed in less than 10 hours.

“The fire workers need to have as much data as possible about the location of the fires,” Mandl says, “because the big problem is that fires don’t stay still.”

San Diego Wild Fires kmz for Task #73

Linda Derezinski — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 13:56:00 +0000

The GeoBliki workflow kicked off this morning after the the Level 1G data was processed by JPL. Many OGC services were orchestrated using our GeoBusiness Management Process (GeoBPMS): Sensor Planning Service(SPS), Sensor Observation Service(SOS), Web Feature Server(WFS) from GeoBliki; Web Processing Service from JPL WPS; Web Coverage Service(WCS) from GMU. This workflow produced a new data product for the thermal overlay of task #73.

Here is the Google Earth kmz file .

If you want to know about new data products as they happen, then follow EO-1 GeoBliki on twitter.

A new PubSub service will be coming online soon!

Stay tuned.

San Diego Wild Fires

Patrice Cappelaere — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:22:00 +0000

NASA support has been requested in for a state of emergency so we are all trying to help as we can. We have modified our GEOSS workflows to monitor the situation in the San Diego area. Fire threats are being detected based on MODIS data and EO-1 is being tasked twice a day to image the area.

RESTful workflows implemented using OpenWFERu are being used to process the imagery to deliver the data to the first responders. First thermal imagery processed onboard the satellite has been downlinked and is available on http://eo1.geobliki.com. Higher resolution data will be available as soon as possible.

As more than 500,000 people are being evacuated and many are loosing their homes, our prayers and thoughts are with you.

GEOSS Wild Fires Scenario on YouTube

Patrice Cappelaere — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 13:51:00 +0000

Our latest video on our GEOSS use-case finally made it to YouTube.

With Many thanks to Ingo Simonis!

OpenGeoSpatial Technical Committee Meeting

Patrice Cappelaere — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 13:19:00 +0000

RESTFul OGC Web Services were a big topic at this meeting in boulder Colorado this week. OGC has formed a REST working group and many have signed up to develop potential reference implementations of RESTful OGC Services for demonstration in December at the next meeting In Italy.

But we need more volunteers for a bake-off! We are starting to reach the tipping point and this is exciting.

GEOSS Wild Fires In South Africa Movie Available

Patrice Cappelaere — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 13:54:00 +0000

After several days spent at the National Academy of Sciences in DC, we finally completed the first draft of our movie to be presented at the GEO plenary in DC, and at the GEO Ministerial Summit in Cape Town, South Africa in November.

Our use-case: Wild Fire Monitoring in South Africa, is part of a pilot effort sponsored by the OGC. We still have some work to do to bring in more satellite assets (SPOT, IRS…). Some integration will also be done as part of OWS-5.

Automation is supported by workflows (OpenWFE) integrated within a Resource-Oriented Architecture, This effort will be presented in Boulder next week at the OGC Technical Committee.

The end-product allows end-users to quickly access the published data, order custom products for additional situational awareness. Mashups can be quickly visualized and shared in Mapufacture.

Thanks to John Mettraux and AJ Turner for their support.

IKHANA UAV Took Off

Patrice Cappelaere — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 00:52:00 +0000

The Ikhana unmanned vehicle took-off from NASA-DFRC / Edwards AFB at 2:34:45 PM PDT. Mission is planned for nominal 17-hour mission to fires in ID / MT / WY. Hope you are following such on live video feed at CDE or CDE-Lite (access via WRAP website at http://geo.arc.nasa.gov/sge/WRAP).

Based on the filed flight-plan, we automatically generated targets of interests based on MODIS “hot pixels” with a 6nm corridor. Draper Laboratory optimized the targets based on predicted cloud coverage in the area.

As a result, ASTER and EO-1 were tasked to image CASTLE ROCK, Idaho. It will be interesting to get the raw data, process it and overlay it on the map with the UAV imagery…

The UAV will also be able to task EO-1 to take complementary imagery as needed.

The Geo-Web in action…

South African Power Lines

Patrice Cappelaere — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 14:03:00 +0000

Fires in South Africa are threatening high voltage power lines. Using satellite information from TERRA and AQUA, we can get the “hot” pixels in that area.

Using a power grid layout, we determine the likelihood of fires threatening a particular line or within a 10km corridor along the power lines. This is used to automatically task EO-1 to obtain a hyperspectral image and more detailed information.

Processing of the data using workflows, gives us a 30m resolution and actual fire intensity in the area.

This is part of an international GEOSS pilot demonstration that will take place in Washington DC (Sept 10) and in Cape Town in October.

We are currently adding UAV support and other satellite assets such as the ASTER imager on TERRA and SPOT-5 to our Global Earth Observing Geo-Web using the standard OGC interfaces and a Resource Oriented Approach (ROA).