OGC Press Releases

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

March 25, 2009, Wayland, Massachusetts. The Open Geospatial Consortium OGC® announced that Athina Trakas has been appointed as Director European Services for the OGC. In her new position, Ms. Trakas will plan and manage OGC outreach and recruitment in Europe, working out of the OGC's Bonn office.

"In her previous activities, Athina has been an extraordinary asset to the OGC," said Mark Reichardt, OGC's President and CEO, "and we are fortunate indeed to have her on staff now, working full time to advance the goals of the Consortium in Europe. European membership in the OGC recently surpassed North American membership, and we anticipate a lot of activity as European companies and organizations seek to evolve geospatial standards that address European needs."

Athina Trakas has worked part time for the OGC since August 2006. During this time she also served as Director of Business Development and Marketing for WhereGroup GmbH & Co. KG, where she was responsible for activities concerning cooperation with institutions and organizations on a national and international level. In that role, she promoted standardized WebGIS solutions -- including OGC Web Services (OWS) standards -- as well as open source software. Prior to that position, from 1998 to 2006 she served CCGIS (Consulting Center for Geographical Information Systems) in a variety of management roles as the company evolved from start-up to a successful consultancy. In 2007, CCGIS merged with Karta.Go and Geo¬Consortium to form WhereGroup. Athina has also worked for the German Cultural Council. She holds a degree in Geography from the University of Bonn.

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

Wayland, MA, March 25, 2009.  The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) announces adoption and availability of the OpenGIS(R) Web Coverage Processing Service (WCPS) Interface Standard. The WCPS specification is available at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/wcps.

The OpenGIS(R) Web Coverage Service Interface Standard (WCS) defines a protocol-independent language for the extraction, processing, and analysis of multi-dimensional gridded coverages (see http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/glossary/c | coverages) representing sensor, image, or statistics data. Services implementing this language provide access to original or derived sets of geospatial coverage information, in forms that are useful for client-side rendering, input into scientific models, and other client applications. Further information about WCPS can be found at the http://www.ogcnetwork.net/wcps | WCPS Service page of the OGC Network.

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

Bonn, Germany, March 25, 2009 - The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) announces that an Interoperability Day event will be held in conjunction with HellasGI on Friday the 3rd of April, 2009 at the Ledra Marriot Hotel in Athens, Greece.

OGC standards are becoming widely used in the geospatial world and they hold the key to building geospatial data infrastructures based on interoperable components. The EU supports wider adoption of these and other standards through the INSPIRE directive.

While market demand for standards-compliant components is growing, many end users have questions about how the standards work and how the standards will benefit them in their day to day business. Users also have questions about how the standards are being implemented at the national and European levels.

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

Wayland, Mass., March 13, 2009 - The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) announces that PCI Geomatics has upgraded its OGC membership level to Strategic membership. PCI Geomatics' decision to upgrade underscores its commitment to geospatial interoperability, the geospatial industry, and the OGC. PCI Geomatics (as PCI Remote Sensing) was one of the eight charter members of OGC at its founding in 1994.

Strategic Membership is the highest level of OGC membership. To help advance OGC program objectives, Strategic Members provide significant resources in the form of funding and in-kind resources. As a Strategic Member, PCI Geomatics will contribute to the OGC process at a high level to help realize the full societal, economic and scientific benefits of integrating sophisticated but easy-to-use geospatial technology into consumer, commercial and institutional activities worldwide.

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

March 12, 2009, Wayland, Massachusetts.  At the recent Map World Forum trade show and conference in Hyderabad, India, India's GIS Development communication network awarded the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC(R)) GIS Development's "Professional Service to Geospatial Community Award". The award is a handsome 10 inch wooden globe sculpted to depict layers of information.

The award was presented by Shri M. Hamid Ansari, Vice President of India, who was on hand to open the conference. OGC president and CEO Mark Reichardt accepted the award on behalf of OGC members, staff and Board of Directors.

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

March 12, 2009, Wayland, Mass. - The membership of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) is requesting comments from the public on the candidate OGC Document, "The OGC Specification Model - Writing Modular Specifications".

This document, prepared by the Policy 1.0 Standards Working Group, derives from the collective experience of members in developing and implementing OGC standards, geospatial applications, platforms and services. It provides a logical model and template for candidate standards to assure their internal logic and conformance to accepted software development procedures and the OGC's policy and rules regarding the structure of standards and the types of information that they must provide. The policy guidance will make implementation of OGC standards and the construction of compliance tests easier through enforced traceability of requirements to implementation tests, and it will make modularization of both standards and implementations more explicit and consistent across dependent standards and implementations.

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

Wayland, MA, March 5, 2009 - The Open Geospatial Consortium Inc. (OGC(R)) will launch the second phase of an Interoperability Experiment on ocean science interoperability at a meeting (http://www.oostethys.org/oceansie2) on March 20, 2009. The initiators of the experiment seek participation by other organizations interested in interoperability among information systems used in ocean research.

In December 2006 OGC members started Oceans Science Interoperability Experiment Phase I (Oceans IE Phase I) to investigate use of services implementing the OpenGIS(TM) Web Feature Services (WFS) and Sensor Observation Services (SOS) Interface Standards for representing and exchanging point data records from fixed in-situ marine platforms. (See the final report at http://www.oostethys.org/outreach/working_folder/ogcreport/ogc-oie-20080822.pdf/view).

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

February 27, 2009, Wayland, Mass. - The membership of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) is requesting comments from the public on the candidate OpenGIS® Web Map Tiling Service (WMTS) Interface Standard.

The candidate WMTS Interface Standard is much like the OGC's popular Web Map Server (WMS) Interface Standard, but it enables better server performance in applications that involve many simultaneous requests. To improve performance, instead of creating a new image for each request, it returns small pre-generated images (e.g., PNG or JPEG) or reuses identical previous requests that follow a discrete set of tile matrices. This proposed standard provides support for multiple architectural patterns - KVP, REST and SOAP.

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

February 25, 2009, Wayland, Massachusetts. The Board of Directors of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has chartered a committee of the Board to specifically address the "spatial law and policy issues" which will influence development requirements of the Consortium's technology process. The Spatial Law and Policy Committee (SLPC) will be chaired by OGC director and Executive Committee member, Kevin Pomfret, and will be organized under board leadership as an educational forum to include both select member and community participation.

In the past, legal issues associated with spatial data and technology were primarily a concern for lawyers that worked with or for the government. Now, both public sector and private sector users and providers of geospatial data and technologies face a wide range of legal issues associated with growth in consumer and business applications for spatial technology. Such applications include 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. All of these applications raise issues that involve intellectual property rights, liability, privacy, and national security. 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

February 17, 2009, Wayland, Massachusetts.  The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) recently held its biennial election of directors. Of the 21 elected members of the consortium's 2009-2010 Board of Directors, 16 serving members were returned and four new members have been seated. The new OGC board members are Jeffery Peters, Kevin Pomfret, François Robida and Rob van de Velde.

Jeffery Peters currently serves as Director of Federal Programs for ESRI, Inc. In his role at ESRI, Mr. Peters is responsible for the vision and strategy for geospatial technologies and solutions serving the national Government and its international operations.