Video-surveillance Format for Interoperability (ISO/TC223/WG5)

Initiated with the LINDO requirements and with the impetus of the French Police frustrated by its day-to-day difficulties, a standardization group has been created at AFNOR open to, and attended by, all the interested parties (police, gendarmerie, large operators, cities, installers, SME, equipment vendors, integrators, etc).

The lack of standard export format was also recognized as critical, worldwide and the topic was endorsed in 2008 by ISO/TC223, a Sweden-led technical committee of ISO focused on Societal Security and a dedicated international working group (ISO/TC223/WG 5) created, with secretariat given to AFNOR.

The LINDO coordinator, Jean-François Sulzer, has been selected as the convener of both the national and the ISO working groups.

Delegates from the national bodies of China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Israel, Korea, Japan and USA are working hard to produce a standard (ISO project 22311), with a completion objective of Q1 2011. Promulgation is expected less than one year later.

Project 22311 relies heavily on activities of other groups like ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 (MPEG) and with CENELEC TC79 (Alarm Systems).

Liaisons have also been established with the two active forums ONVIF and PSIA to make sure that all the international vendors are involved.

Topic Maps (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34/WG3)

Topic Maps technology is an ISO standard (ISO 13250) for the representation and interchange of knowledge. It allows a varying degree of formality which makes it easily accessible to domain experts who are not knowledge engineers (unlike, for example, RDF/OWL). In addition, it provides a mechanism to link to external resources (such as multimedia resources).

Rani Pinchuk from Space Applications Services has joined in the in April 2008 to the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34 group and has since disseminated inputs from the LINDO project to the Topic Maps standard. Since 2009, Mr. Pinchuk is co-editing the TMQL (Topic Maps Query Language) standard (ISO 18048).

RDF and SPARQL

RDF (Resource Description Framework) is a knowledge representation language dedicated to the annotation of resources within the Semantic Web. Currently, many documents and contents are annotated via RDF due to its simple data model and its formal semantics. The W3C published a specification of RDF's data model and XML syntax as a Recommendation in 1999. Work then began on a new version that was published as a set of related specifications in 2004.

SPARQL is the query language for querying RDF knowledge bases. SPARQL can be used to express queries across diverse data sources, whether the data is stored natively as RDF or viewed as RDF via middleware. SPARQL contains capabilities for querying required and optional graph patterns along with their conjunctions and disjunctions. SPARQL also supports extensible value testing and constraining queries by source RDF graph. The results of SPARQL queries can be results sets or RDF graphs. In 2008, the W3C published the latest specification of SPARQL as a Recommendation.