OGC Press Releases

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

July 21, 2007, Wayland, Massachusetts. The Open Geospatial Consortium
(OGC®) has issued a Request for Quotes/Call for Participation (RFQ/CFP) for the OGC Web Services, Phase 6 (OWS-6) Interoperability Initiative, a testbed to advance OGC's open interoperability framework for geospatial capabilities. The RFQ/CFP will available at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/50 after 18:30 EDT, July 21.

The organizations sponsoring OWS-6 seek open standards for their interoperability requirements. After analyzing those requirements, the OGC Interoperability Team recommended to the sponsors that the content of the OWS-6 initiative be organized around the following threads:

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

Wayland, Mass., July 18, 2008 -The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) announced that on May 15 and 16, 2008, more than 40 researchers, members of the GEO (Group on Earth Observations) Secretariat and representatives of the European Commission met at the GEO offices in Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss concepts, ongoing activities, and requirements for future progress in the domain of Sensor Webs (http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/markets-technologies/swe). Organized by GEO Task DA-07-04 (Sensor Web Enablement), led by the Meraka Institute in South Africa and supported by the GEO Secretariat, the workshop was also supported and endorsed by: the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Pretoria, South Africa; the European Commission through the SANY and OSIRIS integrated projects; and the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC).

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

Wayland, Mass., July 17, 2008 - The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) announced today that PCI Geomatics has upgraded its membership level from Principal to Principal Plus. PCI Geomatics' decision to participate at this new level 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.

Principal Plus members take a more active role in shaping the direction of the Consortium's standards activities and in encouraging the use and acceptance of OpenGIS® standards worldwide. In addition to the responsibilities of Principal Members, Principal Plus members dedicate resources directly to OGC programs. PCI Geomatics has committed resources in support of OGC's outreach and business development efforts in India and China.

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

Wayland, MA, USA, July 17, 2008. The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) has held its biennial election and two new directors, Lisa Campbell and Dr. John C. Curlander, have been elected to the Board of Directors.

Lisa Campbell is vice president in charge of Autodesk's Geospatial Solutions. In her role at Autodesk, she is responsible for the company's vision and strategy for geospatial technologies and solutions serving the Utility, Telecommunications and Government markets. She brings over 20 years of marketing and software industry experience to the Board's deliberations, and she brings fresh insights into the convergence of geospatial and Computer Aided Design (CAD), 3D and facilities management technologies. These convergence efforts are manifested, in part, through the Architecture/Engineering/Construction/Owner/Operator (AECOO) testbed that Autodesk will play a key role in. The AECOO testbed is being managed by OGC with the buildingSMART alliance and others.

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

Wayland, Mass., 2 July, 2008 - The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) announced that a Call for Participation (CFP) in Phase 2 of the GEOSS (Global Earth Observation System of Systems) Architecture Implementation Pilot (AIP) has been issued by the GEO (Group on Earth Observations).

Phase 1 of the AIP demonstrated GEO Portal and Clearinghouse solutions. Phase 2 will establish "operational, research and technical exemplars," services that support the GEOSS Societal Benefit Areas (application domains).

The CFP invites GEO Members and Participating Organizations to:

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.