OGC Press Releases

Sam Bacharach
Executive Director, Outreach and Community Adoption
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-703-352-3938
sbacharach@opengeospatial.org

June 30, 2008, Wayland, Mass. - The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) membership approved a 30 day public comment period for a revision to the OpenGIS® Web Coverage Service (WCS) Interface Standard. The revision includes two extensions to WCS: the WCS 1.1 Transaction Extension and the Web Coverage Processing Service Processing (WCPS) Extension.

The WCS Interface Standard (http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/wcs) specifies an application programming interface (API) for requesting coverage data, such as imagery, from one or more distributed sources.

Sam Bacharach
Executive Director, Outreach and Community Adoption
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-703-352-3938
sbacharach@opengeospatial.org

June 25, 2008. Wayland, Mass.  The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) is inviting the public to offer change requests for consideration by the OGC Technical Committee on a revision of the OpenGIS® Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding Standard. GML defines a data encoding in XML for geographic data and a grammar to express models of such data using XML Schema. 

GML has come into wide use since it was first adopted as an OGC standard in 2002. Implementations typically specify GML application schemas. GML is consistent with the OGC's entire open geospatial standards platform. GML is the standard that enables information communities and other standards organizations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and OASIS to insert geospatial components into their standards and be confident that their standards will be compatible with mainstream information infrastructure methods of conveying spatial/temporal information.

Sam Bacharach
Executive Director, Outreach and Community Adoption
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-703-352-3938
sbacharach@opengeospatial.org

Wayland, Mass., June 17, 2008 - The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) and the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) announced that they have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to cooperate in advancing standards-based, interoperable workflow and Web-enabled geospatial content sharing, modeling and visualization to address the needs of their members.

Mark Reichardt, President of the OGC, explained, "The OGC is pleased to have the opportunity to work in partnership with the WfMC to help make geospatial information and processing a more integral part of workflow and business process management (BPM)."

Athina Trakas
OGC - Business Development Europe
Siemensstrasse 8
53121 Bonn
Tel: +49 - 228 - 909038-22
Fax: +49 - 228 - 909038-11
mobile: +49 - 173 - 211 26 23
atrakas@opengeospatial.org
http://www.opengeospatial.org

Martin Klopfer
European Programs Director
Open Geospatial Consortium Inc.
Werner-Heisenberg-Strasse 73
D-26723 Emden, Germany
phone: +49.4921.9369-214
fax: +49.4921.9369-215
Mobile: +49.176.2055-1651
mklopfer@opengeospatial.org
www.opengeospatial.org

OGC Technical Interoperability Day and Business Interoperability Day

Bonn, Germany, 19 May 2008: OGC Interoperability Days will be held on Tuesday and Wednesday, June 3 and 4, 2008, in Potsdam, Germany. These events will coincide with the OGC Technical Committee meetings, which are being held in Potsdam that week. The first day will be in English and the second day in German.

On Tuesday, Mark Reichardt, President of the OGC, will open the event with a keynote on the value of open standards and their potential to open new market segments. For customers as well as software suppliers and solution integrators there is a huge win-win potential in using open standards based components to build sustainable geospatial solutions.

Sam Bacharach
Executive Director, Outreach and Community Adoption
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-703-352-3938
sbacharach@opengeospatial.org

Wayland, Mass., May 2, 2008 - The buildingSMART alliance, the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) and Sponsors of the AECOO (Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Owner and Operator) Testbed have today issued a Request for Quotation (RFQ) and Call for Participation (CFP) for the AECOO-Phase 1 Testbed. The testbed aims to foster business transformation as defined in the United States National Building Information Modeling Standard, Part 1 (NBIMS) with technology for interoperability involving intelligent building models with 3D geometric capabilities. Business and communications, quantity take-off for cost estimating, and energy analysis are considered as they relate to planning and design for a capital facility. These three topic areas were selected by the Sponsors to focus attention on defining workable information solutions and services for information visualization and sharing.

Sam Bacharach
Executive Director, Outreach and Community Adoption
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-703-352-3938
sbacharach@opengeospatial.org

Wayland, MA May 1, 2008 - The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.® (OGC) announced that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) program Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) is implementing a number of OGC standards. IOOS is a multidisciplinary system that will provide data and information on the oceans and Great Lakes, at both local and national scales, for use by a wide variety of decision makers.

"NOAA is proud to lead this national effort to link ocean observations in an easy-to-use standard format that provides accurate and timely information so people can make informed business and recreational decisions," said Zdenka Willis, director of the NOAA Integrated Ocean Observing System Program. "NOAA and our partner organizations will use the integrated data to improve forecasts of severe weather and natural hazards, enhance pollution tracking models, and create a more complete picture of our ocean planet."

Sam Bacharach
Executive Director, Outreach and Community Adoption
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-703-352-3938
sbacharach@opengeospatial.org

Wayland, Mass., April 14, 2008 - The members of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) today announced the approval of the OpenGIS® KML Encoding Standard (OGC KML), marking KML's transition into an open standard which will be maintained by the OGC. Developers will now have a standard approach for using KML to code and share visual geographic content in existing or future web-based online maps and 3D geospatial browsers like Google Earth^TM.

"We are pleased to see the adoption of KML as an OGC standard," said Ron Lake, chairman and chief executive officer of Galdos Systems Inc. "We believe that this is a major step forward for the OGC and for the entire geographic information community, as it provides the first broadly accepted standard for the visualization of geographic information."

Sam Bacharach
Executive Director, Outreach and Community Adoption
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-703-352-3938
sbacharach@opengeospatial.org

Wayland, Mass. April 9, 2008 - The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.® (OGC) membership has approved the OASIS ebRIM (electronic business Registry Information Model) application profile of the OpenGIS® Catalogue Service 2.0.2 standard. The Catalogue Standard specifies a design pattern that allows for the definition of interfaces called application profiles based on different standards, such as ZF39.50, ebRIM, UDDI, or ISO metadata, that support the ability to publish and search collections of descriptive information (metadata) about geospatial data, services and related information objects.

Sam Bacharach
Executive Director, Outreach and Community Adoption
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-703-352-3938
sbacharach@opengeospatial.org

Wayland, MA, April 9, 2006. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has issued calls for sponsors of two interoperability initiatives: the OGC Web Services, Phase 6 (OWS-6) Testbed, and the OGC Pilot in support of GEOSS. OGC also seeks to establish alliances with standards bodies having technology relevant to the two initiatives.

The OWS series of Testbeds has been an effective mechanism for organizations to meet their interoperability needs through development of open geospatial standards. OWS-6 will develop interoperability specifications in the areas of Sensor Web Enablement, geoprocessing workflows, 3-dimensional information management including indoor location, aeronautical information systems, enterprise web services, mass-market geoservices and compliance testing of OGC standards. These "threads" address interoperability issues affecting emergency management and homeland security, defense, Earth observation, transport and logistics, e-commerce and other domains. Interested organizations are invited to a planning meeting on 30 April 2008 in Herndon, Virginia. The 30 April Sponsor Meeting will review the OGC standards baseline, discuss OWS-5 results, and identify OWS-6 requirements and plans.

Sam Bacharach
Executive Director, Outreach and Community Adoption
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-703-352-3938
sbacharach@opengeospatial.org

Carol Geyer
Director of Communications
OASIS
Tel: +1 978 667-5115 x209
carol.geyer@oasis-open.org

Boston and Wayland, MA, USA; March 12, 2008 - Progress on ongoing collaborative efforts was announced today by two international standards consortia, the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) and OASIS (the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards). The groups have fostered an active commitment to cooperation since signing a Memorandum of Agreement in 2006.

"OASIS Standards enable a broad set of capabilities, and OGC's standards apply wherever 'where' and 'when' are included," explained Mark Reichardt, President and CEO of the OGC. "For the members of both organizations and for the broader global community of IT developers and users, it's important that the two organizations work together to strengthen open standards-based interoperability."