geospatial

Licensing of OGC services surely is a means to get more data published, which requires certain agreements and which otherwise is just locked away. At the recent GSDI World Conference (GSDI 13) in Quebec City I heard much talk about harmonizing license conditions in order to make it easier to classify them and build tools to support them. I fully agree that this would make life much easier, especially for software vendors like con terra. But our experience in dealing with these issues practically for many years – and in providing an off-the-shelf product to support users in their licensing efforts – is that license conditions have to implement a data provider's business model, not the other way round.

Last week in Austin, Texas, there was a meeting of the OGC members who are planning an OGC North American Forum. People working in organizations representing Canada, Mexico and the United States of America came together to outline the goals and the formulation of the forum. You are probably wondering what this has to do with the Middle East. Well, quite a lot actually.

There are many, many international geospatial conferences. There are those dedicated to scientific topics, some related to specific topics, such as the GSDI Association conferences and spatial data infrastructures, and then there are many vendor-specific conferences and exhibitions. However, there are very few geospatial events dedicated to bringing together all the industry leaders from the public sector, the private sector, academia and research.