OGC Press Releases

Sam Bacharach
Executive Director, Outreach
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC)
Wayland, MA
USA
tel: +1-703-352-3938
sbacharach@opengeospatial.org

or

Dr. Ashok Kaushal
Managing Director
PCI Geomatics (India)
6 Pashan Greens
Ramnagar Colony
NDA Road
Pune 411021
India
tel: +91 (20) 22951825
kaushal@pcigeomatics.com

New Delhi, September 1, 2009. The India Forum of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) was recently chartered to provide government, academic, research and industry organizations in India with opportunities to learn about and discuss issues related to interoperability of geographic information involving OGC standards. The Forum seeks to promote interoperability and create synergy between the various producers and users of geographic information and geomatics products and services in India. The Forum also provides a way for Indian organizations to  coordinate their efforts to ensure that Indian requirements are addressed by the international standards of the OGC.

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

August 26, 2009, Wayland, Massachusetts. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announces an important new set of public resources for learning about, developing and implementing interoperable geospatial capabilities.  The OGCNetwork "Learn" page (http://www.ogcnetwork.net/learn) offers links to

  * Courses, journals, and professional papers
  * Articles
  * Compliance testing information
  * Conference presentations by OGC staff and members
  * Discussion forums
  * Document motions from OGC meetings
  * Email discussion lists
  * Links to videos
  * OGC policy guidance on Lat/Lon axis order
  * OGC standards document catalog
  * OGC Interoperability Days event information
  * Tutorials on developing implementations of OGC standards, such as the OpenGIS® Web Map (WMS) Service, Web Coverage Service (WCS), Sensor Observation Service (SOS), and Geography Markup Language (GML) in JPEG 2000 standards.

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

and/or

Jinsoo You
Chair, OGC Korea Forum
The u-City Research Institute
Yonsei University
Seoul, Korea
tel: +82-2-2123-8116
goodtree@yonsei.ac.kr

Seoul, Korea, August 24, 2009: The Korea Forum of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) is a Korean organization chartered to provide government, academic, research and industry organizations in Korea with opportunities to learn about and discuss issues related to interoperability of geographic information involving OGC standards. The Forum seeks to promote interoperability and create synergy between the various producers and users of geographic information and geomatics products and services in Korea. The Forum also provides a way for Korean organizations to coordinate their efforts to ensure that Korean requirements are addressed by the international standards of the OGC.

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

Elaine M. Groves
OSCRE Americas, Inc
404-226-0181
Elaine.groves@oscre.org

Wayland, Mass., August 19, 2009 - The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) and the Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate (OSCRE) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to collaborate in standards development and to enable and promote the use of Web based geospatial technologies in real estate commerce and real property management. 

"There's a growing interest among OGC members in standards related to the built environment and we are fortunate to have the opportunity to work with OSCRE," said Mark Reichardt, president and CEO of the OGC. "There's a tremendous need for better information transfer among companies and agencies that  buy, sell, own, occupy, inspect, appraise, manage, design, build and protect real estate, and geospatial information is important in all these activities."

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

Wayland, Mass., August 12, 2009 - The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) and the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization (MISMO) recently signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU).  Under the terms of the MOU, the organizations will collaborate on standards development and outreach to enable and promote the use of Web based geospatial technologies in real property transaction applications.

Mark Reichardt, CEO and president of the OGC, explained that, "The OGC Board, membership and staff are excited about this partnership and the possibilities it brings to both organizations.  Real estate by definition is a highly place-based activity.  With so many actors involved in real estate development, transactions and forms of management, Web-based geospatial standards can help to further advance the industry in its modernization.  MISMO data standards and OGC Service and data standards enable a straightforward path to realizing benefits across this industry."

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

August 7, 2009, Wayland, Massachusetts.  The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announces that it will hold a Spatial Law and Policy Summit at The Westin Washington, D.C. City Center on October 7, 2009. Professionals from the government and private sector whose work involves laws and policies related to geospatial technology are invited to register and attend.

This unprecedented event will feature talks and panel discussions by experts familiar with the wide range of legal and policy issues associated with growth in consumer and business applications of geospatial systems, software and services. The growing use of Earth browsers, satellite navigation devices in cars and PDA's, location-based services associated with cell phones, business intelligence, social networking and satellite tracking of vehicles and equipment raises a number of issues concerning privacy, intellectual property rights, liability,  and national security. As the speakers will explain, in many cases, the existing legal and policy framework is inadequate to provide governments, businesses and consumers clear guidance on these issues.

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

Wayland, MA, 4 August, 2009. The Open Geospatial Consortium Inc. (OGC) will launch an Authentication Interoperability Experiment on 2 October, 2009. The initiators of the experiment seek participation by other organizations interested in developing standard ways of implementing authentication and related security capabilities in applications involving OGC Web Services standards.

The Authentication Interoperability Experiment will test standard ways of transferring authentication information between OGC clients and OGC services using existing mechanisms such as HTTP Authentication, HTTP Cookies, SSL/X509, SAML, Shibboleth, OpenID and WS-Security.

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

Wayland, MA, July 31, 2009. The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®), the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) are conducting a Climate Challenge Integration Plugfest (CCIP) to be launched at the FOSS4G (Free, Open Source Software for Geomatics) Conference in Sydney, Australia, 20-23 October, 2009 (http://2009.foss4g.org).

CCIP Participants are invited to deploy services that implement OGC standards, or clients for such services.

The CCIP is a prime opportunity for vendors, users, and other interested parties to mutually refine services, interfaces and protocols in the context of a hands-on engineering experience expected to shape the future of geospatial and imagery-related Web Services software development and Web publication of scientific geospatial data. Participation is encouraged by commercial entities as well as free and open source projects.

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

Wayland, Mass., July 23, 2009 – The European Space Agency (ESA) has implemented OGC’s geospatial interoperability standards in interfaces and encodings that are essential parts of the Heterogeneous Mission Accessibility (HMA) initiative. HMA is ESA's interoperability framework for coordinated data discovery and access set up in collaboration with the European and Canadian Space Agencies of the GSCB. HMA will be exploited within the Global Monitoring for the Environment and Security activity (GMES) to ensure interoperability among some 40 different Earth Observation satellite missions. GMES is the European Initiative for the establishment of a European capacity for Earth Observation. The main objective of GMES is to monitor and better understand our environment.

ESA’s most recent HMA contract, awarded to EOX IT Services GbmH -- an Austrian company leading a consortium that includes GIM from Belgium, Jacobs University Bremen from Germany and Spot Image from France -- is “HMA Follow On – Online Data Access.” Under this contract, an Earth Observation extension to the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Interface Standard will be submitted to the OGC, possibly leading to a community-specific profile.

To foster industrial implementation of the standard in products and broad uptake of those products in the marketplace, the contract has as one of its deliverables an open source software implementation of the EO-WCS.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 385 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OpenGIS® Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org.

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

Wayland, Mass., July 22, 2009 –The OGC Technical Committee recently approved four Naming Authority policies, an OGC Compliance Test Language (CTL) Best Practice, and a policy for writing and publishing OGC Standards.

The OGC has an officially registered Uniform Resource Name (URN) as defined in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) RFC 5165 and as registered with IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). The OGC members have approved a set of policies and procedures for submitting URN proposals, reviewing such proposals, and providing the infrastructure for maintaining an OGC registry of resources, including URNs. These policies and procedures are set forth in the following "OGC Policy Directives," available at: http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/policies/directives :