Wide-area motion imagery (WAMI) sensors are placed on helicopters, balloons, small aircraft, or unmanned aerial vehicles and are used to image small city-sized areas at approximately 0.5 m/pixel and about one or two frames/s [1]. The geospatial-temporal data sets produced by these systems allow for the observation of many dynamic phenomena that were previously inaccessible in street-level video data, but the efficient exploitation of this data poses significant technical challenges for image and video analysis and for data mining. Such sensors increasingly are being used for persistent surveillance of large urban areas [2]. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has now adopted the OGC Wide Area Motion Imagery Best Practices Document (WAMI BP) as an official OGC Best Practice.

The OGC WAMI Best Practices Document recommends a set of Web service interfaces for the dissemination of Wide Area Motion Imagery (WAMI) products. It describes a performance centric, scalable grammar and schema that enable globally federated dissemination of WAMI products for high performance, high-speed consumption.

The service interfaces described in the OGC WAMI Best Practices Document are designed to be modular and extensible. Each service uses HTTP 1.1 as a base reference standard and each is stateless and RESTful. The services are read-only (i.e. server is not permitted to change the data). The grammar draws heavily from existing OGC standards.

The candidate OGC WAMI Best Practices document is available and free to the public at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/bp. A „WAMI Primer“ is available to help developers implement this Best Practice.

[1] http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5562653&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D5562653
[2] http://www.defence-update.net/wordpress/20100704_new-wide-area-motion-imagery-systems-at-darpa.html