Open Standards

The work of the OGC has relevance across a number of domains or communities of interest, but in no domain has there has been more work done to harness the power of open geospatial standards than in the domain of Spatial Data Infrastructures. Earlier this month I had the pleasure of joining Mark Reichardt, Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) Association Board member and President and CEO of the OGC, at the Global Geospatial Conference in Quebec.

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.

This year's Free and Open Source Software for GIS conference will take place in Dessau (Germany) from 20-22 March. [1] 
 
In recent years it has been a successful approach to combine the OSGeo conference with the Open Street Map
community event. As usual, many presentations cover open standards and OGC related topics. Geoportal applications for different communities will be presented as well as presentations on more technical aspects. The conference will also be attended by OGC members, many of whom will provide an insight into actual developments of OGC standards and related topics such as Semantic Web (RDF), 3D applications, WMTS, REST architectures etc.