What Members and Users Say About OGC
The OGC invites members of the OGC and users of OGC standards to offer their testimonials for posting in this Endorsements section.
Visitors, select a name in the first column of the table below to view that company’s, agency’s or organization’s endorsement page. (* - Asterisk indicates OGC Member.) The other columns in the table show in which of the OGC Market & Technology Sectors these companies, agencies and organizations are involved.
Value is the key.
In summary, the OGC serves its members and their customers and stakeholders by helping them deliver more for less.
Since 1994, users and producers of products, services and solutions that involve geospatial technologies such as GIS, Earth imaging, location services, sensors and 3D integration have found extraordinary value in OGC participation, and they have passed that value along to their customers and constituencies.
Agencies, companies and organizations that use geospatial technologies find the OGC process to be an effective open, legal and industry-wide forum to discuss common interoperability challenges and to motivate industry to develop new standards that help them meet those challenges. Such members participate so that they can ultimately become users of the standards they need, and thus they pave the way for other users.
Technology providers also benefit from direct involvement in this requirements development process. They share the cost of interface development, and they benefit from the market growth that results from widespread use of open standards.
For academic organizations, OGC provides a fertile environment for geomatics innovation and for advancement of, and early access to, standards that directly benefit geography and the Earth sciences. Also, increasingly, as “interoperability science” takes form, more and more universities find the OGC to be an inspiration for new curricula and also for university-affiliated start-up business opportunities.
The OGC continues to grow.
Despite the troubling economic outlook, in the last quarter of 2008 membership in the OGC rose to a new high of 370 (and now 383 as of April 2009). Membership among European users and providers grew at a record pace, capped by GeoVirtual (Spain) joining as a Strategic Member, the OGC’s highest level of membership. A number of members raised their level of membership. The number of OGC standards implementations and certified-compliant products and services continues to grow. In the last year, in every way, our Consortium has become more global, more broad-based, more important in the standards world and the marketplace, and more secure in its financial condition.
Shape standards, build partnerships, and reduce your costs.
The OGC consensus process gives members opportunities to shape the standards platform and take advantage of application and partnership opportunities based on "connecting the dots" between different kinds of information systems and different application domains. The standards themselves, of course, help users of standards-implementing products and services "connect the dots" between different kinds of information systems and different application domains.
This progress toward interoperability and technology convergence is driven by user needs and the strategic agendas of those who participate in the standards-setting process. Users collaborate with providers, motivated by the well-documented cost savings that derive from using standards-based architectures. OGC participation gives users a chance to see which companies are serious about the standards that matter to the users.
Much work in the OGC begins in the OGC Interoperability Program's testbeds, pilot projects and interoperability experiments. In this rapid prototyping environment, a sponsor's investment is leveraged by the investment of other sponsors, reducing each sponsor's share of the initiative's cost. This aggregated investment and interest attracts the participation of technology providers who often contribute significant levels of their own resources to develop, test, and demonstrate the ability of draft standards to address sponsor interoperability requirements.
One result of participation in the Interoperability Program is an increased ability to integrate systems and protect technology investments, at a cost that is much, much lower than the cost of one-off integration projects that use custom interfaces and encodings. These savings come first to participants in OGC testbeds, pilot projects and interoperability experiments, and later to the standards-using public.
OGC membership offers an excellent way for governments to stimulate economic activity. Open interfaces and encodings generated from OGC initiatives often spark new business successes, which aggregate into national competitive advantage. Business successes enrich the market with new products and services and more affordable offerings, resulting in commerce, profit, employment and improved international competitiveness. And users of products based on open standards can compete more effectively in international markets.
As more offices in technology-using agencies and their private sector partners begin producing and hosting data, and as the Web becomes the dominant delivery mechanism, Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) become increasingly useful to governments at all levels and to a growing array of industries. The OGC's current work in sensor webs, geospatial rights management, service chaining, geosemantics, data quality and other areas advances SDI development. This results in more opportunities for companies to provide value and more opportunities for governments to provide better service at lower cost by using evolved, interoperable geospatial products and services.
Contact us
Every member in the OGC's diverse membership is interested in the networking opportunities the Consortium provides, and OGC members are engaged in a very broad spectrum of activities. This means that it is likely you would benefit from having a conversation with someone on OGC's staff about how your organization might "plug into" the OGC network of members and activities. Please give us a call.
Sam Bacharach
Executive Director Outreach and Community Adoption Program
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC)
483B Carlisle Drive
Herndon, VA 20170 USA
Office: +1.703.352.3938
sbacharach@opengeospatial.org
Updated: 2009-06-08 12:57:11 EST
