OGC Adopts ebRIM Metamodel for Catalogues

Wayland, MA January 5, 2007 - The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.® (OGC) selected the OASIS standard ebRIM (electronic business Registry Information Model) as the preferred cataloguing metamodel foundation for future application profiles of the OpenGIS® Catalogue Service Web (CS-W) specification. The catalogue specification defines the information required to support discovery and search for data and services and ebRIM provides the requirements to support registration of services like those specified in many OGC standards, as well as geospatial data and other resources.

The Consortium views search and discovery frameworks such as UDDI, registry capability such as ebRIM, and unstructured text searches to be competing for dominance in the Service Oriented Architectures marketplace. However, none of these three options completely satisfies the geospatial requirements defined by the members. ebRIM was selected as the preferred metamodel because it enables catalogs to handle services and a variety of other supporting registry requirements such as symbol libraries, coordinate reference systems, application profiles, and application schemas as well as geospatial data.

"The OGC recognizes that the verdict is still out on the use of UDDI and ebRIM technology, but we need to move forward to support our market now," said Mark E. Reichardt President of OGC. "Our members decided to adopt ebRIM to define the metamodel so that we can proceed to support registration of geospatial information and services."

"This decision is non-exclusive and allows continued development of other OGC Catalogue Specification application profiles. OGC Catalog was written to provide Web discovery of geospatial data and services and this decision provides direction in the combination of discovery with registry services to manage the data and enable machine to machine communication," according to Carl Reed, OGC Chief Technology Officer. "The addition of the registration process enabled by ebRIM does not deprecate the search and discovery services provided by the Z39.50 and CORBA protocol bindings and the ISO Metadata Application Profile."

The OGC® is an international industry consortium of more than 335 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface specifications. OpenGIS® Specifications support interoperable solutions that geo-enable the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. The specifications empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful with all kinds of applications. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org.