23 June 2015. Members of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) request comments on the draft charter for an OGC Hydrologic Features (HY_Features) Standards Working Group (SWG). The purpose of the proposed SWG is to progress the HY_Features hydrologic feature model to the state of an adopted OGC standard for a common and stable identification and referencing of hydrologic features.

Water information needs to be shared between many organisations. HY_Features in conjunction with the OGC WaterML2. standard provides a baseline for improving the way in which water information is organized, managed and shared.

Hydrologic features are the “unit of study” for water information, and a means is required to convey identity of such real-world water-objects through the data processing chain from observation to water information. The work undertaken in the OGC Hydrology DWG led to a series of water-related standards and best practices to manage at different levels of detail the identification, observation and representation of hydrologic features. Examples are the WaterML2.0 standard, the HY_Features common hydrologic feature model and the ongoing GroundWaterML2 work. Each standard is concerned with different aspects of hydrology and water information. In conjunction these standards support a common understanding of the Hydrology phenomenon, which provides the basis of linking application-specific concepts by referencing common semantics. This allows informations systems and Web services as well as domain-specific ontologies (such as the terms using in existing data products) to be linked using a common reference model.

The Hydrologic Feature standard will be split into 3 parts. This approach allows conceptual issues to be addressed separate from physical implementation.

• Part 1: A HY_Features conceptual model (OGC 14-111). The normative model is a machine-readable Unified Modeling Language (UML) artefact published by the OGC.
• Part 2: A GML implementation schema suitable for data transfer of HY_Features object instances, based on ISO 19136 Annex E encoding rules for Application Schema.
• Part 3: OWL and RDF representation suitable for defining links between features that implement the HY_Features model, to based on ISO 19150 encoding rules (when these become an accepted standard).

The draft charter is available for review at  https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/64089. Comments should be sent via email to  Email Contact and are due by 23 July, 2015.

The OGC is an international geospatial standards consortium of more than 500 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. Visit the OGC website at  http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.