GSoC and Master Thesis completed

Busy summer, well or winter, depends on the hemisphere and the full time extent. Last 2-3 months have been packed with work and included about 25.000 air miles (which means concatenated spending several days in airplanes).
I finally managed to finish my Master Thesis "Towards a 4D WebGIS using harmonised datasets: Examined on a New Zealand Example" which examines in the first part existing groundwater-related geoportal projects and scientific applications around the globe, existing and useful, web-based technologies and standards (e.g. OGC) to implement such a portal, a draft architecture. In the second part actual prototypical implementations of a selected subset of the examined standards and and technologies demonstrate their feasibility for the SMART project. I also hold a talk at the GI_Forum conference in Salzburg (proceedings/conference paper).
Furthermore I successfully completed my Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project with the 52°North Initiative, where I implemented an exchangeable encodings mechanism for their Sensor Observation Service (SOS). I additionally implemented a plugin that provides SOS time-series output in the WaterML2.0 format. I could acquire the latest schema, which will be published soon.. we were supposed to write a series of blog articles to document or progress in the project:

• Dynamic output formats for the Sensor Observation Service
• Exchangeable Encodings getting in shape
• Demonstrating Exchangeable Encodings: A Quantum Leap for me

After flying back to New Zealand I was lucky to visit the GeoSciML Face-to-Face-Meeting at GNS Science in Wellington. It was really exciting to meet these people, working on the international standard of a Geoscience Markup Language. also issues around the OneGeology portal have been disussed, as it uses GeoSciML to build up a world geology map. Additionally I could get in touch with one of the inspiring driving persons behind the Canadian Groundwater Information Network and their its sematic foundation, the Groundwater Markup Language (GWML), which itself is derived from GeoSciML.
Now I will dedicate my research to the development of a New Zealand groundwater geoportal within the SMART project, using OGC webservices, GeoSciML and/or GWML, WaterML2.0 and X3D as its foundations to transform and consume all available data relevant to aquifer characterisation and create a completely new, visually appealing 3D/4D view on New Zealand's groundwater resources.

Exciting ;-)

Demonstrating Exchangeable Encodings for SOS - A Quantum Leap

The final sprint towards the end of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is over now. After fixing bugs, working on documentation and actually producing time-series in different formats, the “Exchangeable Encodings for SOS”
project met most of its ambitious goals – and it is demonstrated on the 52°North Google summer of Code Demo Server. Users and developers documenation on the encoding mechanism has also found a place in the 52°North wiki.

We have integrated a plugin mechanism into an SOS server (source code branch), which is based on the main 52°North SOS development line (source code trunk).

Link to the article on the 52°North blog