OGC Press Releases

27 June 2011.   Professor Jacqueline McGlade, Executive Director of the European Environment Agency, was recently elected to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) board of directors.

Professor Jacqueline McGlade is Executive Director of the European Environment Agency. Prior to this appointment in 2003, she was Natural Environment Research Council Professorial Fellow in Environmental Informatics in the Mathematics Department of University College London. She has had numerous appointments at universities, research centers and government agencies, published numerous papers, articles and books, presented and appeared in many radio and television programmes and given public lectures worldwide on climate change and other topics. She is a member of the Environment Advisory Committee of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, UK-China Forum and UK-Japan 21^st Century Group.

David Schell, Chairman of the OGC Board of Directors, said, "The OGC community is extremely fortunate that Jacqueline McGlade has agreed to serve on the Consortium’s board. OGC members from all the domains served by the Consortium appreciate the growing importance of 'sustainability.' The international scope of Professor McGlade’s activities provide her with a unique understanding of global environmental challenges. Her affiliation with the OGC further demonstrates her commitment to collaborative work on behalf of these profound interests."

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 415 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC 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/contact.

24 June 2011 – The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announced that OGC staff and members will be involved in three workshops at the INSPIRE Conference 2011.

Workshop 1: What is Interoperability and How Do We Measure It? Monday 27th June, 14:00-18:00, has been organized by Stefano Nativi (IMAA_CNR) and Siri Jodha Khalsa (NSIDC). Steven Ramage, an Executive Director from the OGC will participate in this afternoon workshop with a talk, "Beyond interoperability: What does interoperability enable?" Steven and Joan Masó (UAB-CREAF) will also participate in a panel session on measuring interoperability.

Workshop 2: "INSPIRE and open standards for sustainable growth," Tuesday 28th June, 9:00-10:30, will be moderated by OGC staff, Steven Ramage and Athina Trakas, Director of European Services. There will be presentations on

• OGC Programs, Process & Procedures
(Athina Trakas, OGC)
• OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) and INSPIRE Annex II and III datasets
  (Peter Baumann, Jacobs University Bremen)
• INSPIRE Discovery, View and Download Services (Roberto Lucchi, Esri)
• Beyond service interfaces - OGC encoding standards in INSPIRE: GML and SLD/SE (Clemens Portele, interactive instruments)
• Handling INSPIRE data themes with WMS and WFS and INSPIRE CSW with the deegree Free and Open Source Software (Martin Seiler, lat/lon)
• Access to INSPIRE data through OGC and ISO compliant services: OGC WMS, WMTS, WFS and CS-W (Alina Kmiecik, Intergraph).

Workshop 2 will also include Ignite sessions (short presentations) from R3 GIS (Peter Hopfgartner, Free GIS Project), and the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen (Tomas Mildorf, Plan4all Project).

Workshop 3: SDI Workshop: ESDIN Lessons, Tuesday 28th June, 11:00 – 12:30, organized by Arnulf Christl (metaspatial), an independent consultant and formerly ESDIN Technical Coordinator, and Athina Trakas from the OGC. During the workshop the participants will have the chance to access ESDIN services with their own software or use Web-based geoportals to create ideas for applications or simply play around to discover the potential of the services.

During the ESDIN project, which was managed by EuroGeographics, National Mapping and Cadastre Agencies (NMCAs) from European Member States set up several dozen INSPIRE View and Download services. ESDIN ended in February 2011, but the consortium partners agreed to continue the operation of the services to serve as a Best Practice Network, enabling developers to explore new ideas and test new components. In ESDIN a multi-faceted architecture was designed to accommodate the needs of a very diverse set of users. This architecture will eventually be the foundation for the authoritative European Location Framework, which will be a valuable and important asset for emerging semantics in a resource oriented architecture.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 415 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. 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/contact.

23 June 2010 -  The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate OGC PUCK Protocol Encoding Standard.

Most sensor networks require careful manual installation and configuration by technicians to assure that software components are properly associated with the physical instruments that they represent. Instrument driver software, configuration files, and "metadata" describing the instrument and its capabilities must be manually installed and associated with a physical instrument port. Sometimes these manual procedures must be performed under physically challenging conditions, increasing the chances of human error. PUCK addresses these challenges by defining a standard instrument protocol to retrieve metadata and other information from the device itself. This information can include OGC SWE SensorML and IEEE 1451 Transducer Electronic Data Sheet (TEDS) documents, as well as actual instrument driver code. Computers on the network can use the PUCK protocol to retrieve this information from installed instruments and utilize it appropriately, e.g. to automatically identify, configure and operate the instruments. Thus PUCK enables automatic self-configuring "plug-and-work" sensor networks.

PUCK is relatively simple, and several manufacturers have implemented the protocol in their instruments' firmware. PUCK augments but doesn't replace existing instrument command sets, so can be implemented without abandoning existing firmware and software applications. PUCK was originally developed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) for oceanographic applications, but is useful in any sensor network containing RS232 or Ethernet-connected instruments. PUCK-enabled instruments have been deployed on ocean observatories in the USA and Europe, and the protocol is being considered for adoption by other projects as well. The OGC Technical Committee’s PUCK Standards Working Group was chartered to process the existing MBARI PUCK protocol as a candidate OGC standard compatible with the OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards baseline.

The candidate OGC PUCK Standard documents are available for review and comment at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/78 .

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 415 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC 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. 

23 June 2011.  Sanjay Kumar, Chief Executive Officer of GIS Development, was recently elected to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) board of directors.

Sanjay Kumar is Chief Executive Officer of GIS Development, a leading geospatial media company in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Pursuing his belief in the importance of the geospatial industry, he has been working towards raising the awareness and profile of the industry through political and administrative leadership worldwide, and working to connect the geospatial industry with other important industries. He actively collaborates with global geospatial organisations and is publisher of Geospatial World magazine and founder of the Map World Forum, a global geospatial industry event. Mr. Kumar has also been associated with many geospatial professional societies and served as Chair of ISPRS WG VI-4 on distance learning from 2000-2004. He is founding Secretary of the Association of Geospatial Industries (AGI) of India and is a member of the National Task Force on Evolving Geospatial Strategy, Government of India. He was the 2010 chair of the OGC Global Advisory Council.

David Schell, Chairman of the OGC Board of Directors, said, “No one has done more than Sanjay Kumar to introduce modern, networked geospatial technologies into the operations of Asian institutions. He has a keen understanding of the benefits of interoperability for organizations of all kinds, and he works tirelessly to help the industry advance in ways that benefit developing nations. He is eminently qualified to enlighten and support the OGC in its understanding of Asian requirements and we are very pleased to have him on the OGC board of directors."

Sanjay Kumar said, “The OGC has contributed significantly towards developing an open and interoperable environment amongst technologies associated with the geospatial industry. The OGC has also pursued initiatives for developing interoperability between geospatial data and technologies and the data and technologies associated with other important industry segments such as architecture, utilities, climate change and so on. It is a great privilege to join the elite group of geospatial thinkers and leaders on the OGC Board and work with them to help bring these technologies to their fullest potential.”

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 415 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC 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/contact.

20 June 2011. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) recently held its biennial election of directors. Of the 19 elected members of the consortium’s 2009-2010 board of directors, 17 serving members were re-elected and two new members have been seated. The new OGC board members are Jacqueline McGlade and Sanjay Kumar.

Professor Jacqueline McGlade is Executive Director of the European Environment Agency. Prior to this appointment in 2003, she was Natural Environment Research Council Professorial Fellow in Environmental Informatics in the Mathematics Department of University College London. She has had numerous appointments at universities, research centers and government agencies, published numerous papers, articles and books, presented and appeared in many radio and television programmes and given public lectures worldwide on climate change and other topics. She is a member of the Environment Advisory Committee of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, UK-China Forum and UK-Japan 21^st Century Group.

Sanjay Kumar is Chief Executive Officer of GIS Development, the leading geospatial media company in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Pursuing his belief in the importance of the geospatial industry, he has been working towards raising the awareness and profile of the industry through political and administrative leadership worldwide, and working to connect the geospatial industry with other important industries. He actively collaborates with global geospatial organisations and is publisher of Geospatial World magazine and founder of the Map World Forum, a global geospatial industry event. Mr. Kumar has also been associated with many geospatial professional societies and served as Chair of ISPRS WG VI-4 on distance learning from 2000-2004. He is founding Secretary of the Association of Geospatial Industries (AGI) of India and is a member of the National Task Force on Evolving Geospatial Strategy, Government of India. He was the 2010 chair of the OGC Global Advisory Council.

Returning to the OGC board are: Dr. John Curlander, Philippe Delclaux, Ben Eazzetta, Steve Hagan, Jefferey Harris, Dr. Mike Jackson, Michael Jones, Dr. Vanessa Lawrence, Stefano Morisi, John Olesak, Jack Pellicci, Jeffery Peters, Kevin Pomfret, François Robida, Velu Sinha, Dr. Christopher Tucker and Rob van de Velde.

Three OGC staff members, Jeff Burnett, Mark Reichardt and David Schell are members of the Board by appointment.

The OGC Board granted the title "Director Emeritus" to the following retired directors whose enduring interest and participation in OGC activities qualifies them for this advisory and honorary role: Dr. Robert W. Corell, Joanne Isham, Dr. R. Siva Kumar, and Jeff Labonté.

David Schell, Chairman of the OGC Board of Directors, said, "The OGC community is extremely fortunate that these extraordinary individuals have agreed to serve on the Consortium’s board. Their collective accomplishment and scope of interest confirm OGC’s expanding role in addressing society’s increasing dependence on spatial information services to understand the complex infrastructure, security and geopolitical challenges facing both public and private sector scientists and policy makers around the world."

The OGC community mourns the passing of Board members Granville Paules, who died January 4, 2011, and Dr. Robert Moses, who died May 3, 2010.

About the OGC

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 415 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC 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/contact.

13 June 2011 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate standard “Earth Observation Metadata profile of the OGC Observations and Measurements Standard.”

The Earth Observation (EO) profile of Observations and Measurements is intended to provide a standard schema for encoding Earth Observation metadata to support the description and cataloguing of products from sensors aboard EO satellites.

This second version of the Earth Observation metadata profile is based on Observations and Measurements, an OGC and ISO standard used in several communities. For example, O&M is used as a basis for the application schemas in several draft INSPIRE Annex II+III data specifications.

The metadata elements defined in this candidate standard are applicable for use in catalogues and applications, including various EO cataloguing applications based on OGC standards like the ebRIM Application Profile of the OGC Catalog Services – Web (CS-W) Interface Standard.

EO products are differentiated by parameters such as date of acquisition and location as well as characteristics pertaining to the type of sensor, such as cloud, haze, smoke or other phenomena obscuring optical imagery. Metadata used to distinguish EO product types are defined in this candidate standard for generic products and also for specific thematic EO products, such as optical, radar, atmospheric, altimetry, limb-looking and synthesized products. In addition, this document describes the mechanism used to extend these schemas to specific EO missions.

The candidate OGC Earth Observation Metadata profile of Observations & Measurements Standard document is available for review and comment at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/77.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 415 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC 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. 

7 June 2011 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announced that it will hold the next OGC Technical Committee and Planning Committee meetings (http://www.opengeospatial.org/event/1106tc) from 12-17 June 2011 in Taichung, Taiwan. This is the first time that OGC meetings have been held in Taiwan.

The week’s events will run concurrently with the Third International AR (Augmented Reality) Standards Meeting, which the OGC is hosting with the support of the OGC Technical Committee and Planning Committee meeting sponsors.

As well as OGC web services, industry has now reached out to the OGC to help formalise and internationalise community work in areas like Open GeoSMS and Augmented Reality.

During the meetings, there will be a very full agenda, including presentations and discussions in many of the OGC Domain Working Groups (http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/wg). The OGC facilitates more than 50 working groups made up of domain experts from across the world. These working groups provide a forum for discussion of key business and technical issues relating to geospatial information integration and interoperability.

Taiwanese developers introduced the candidate Open GeoSMS standard into the OGC standards process. This candidate standard plays a role, along with SWE standards, in Taiwan’s Debris Flow Monitoring system (http://www.awareforum.org/2011/03/sensor-web-enablement-application-for-debris-flow-monitoring-system-in-taiwan/) and other applications. Open GeoSMS Interoperability Day will be held on 17 June from 13:00 to 16:30 in Taipei, Taiwan. At this event, various mobile network operators and developers will test the ability of their implementations to exchange Open GeoSMS messages among heterogeneous geospatial software products and services. For the purpose of further promoting and marketing the Open GeoSMS standard, ITRI will also contribute the Open GeoSMS logo under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY ND) and work with the OGC to promote the Open GeoSMS standard all over the world.

“The GIS Research Center at Feng Chia University is glad to have the honor of hosting the 77th OGC TC meeting in Taiwan,” said Lan-Kun (Peter) Chung, R&D Division Manager at the Center. “We have been involved in the OGC since 2006 and have been advancing OGC standards in government and enterprise applications. The value to users is obviously huge, and we are looking forward to improving the usability and extending the use of OGC standards in Taiwan and other Asia countries.”

The OGC encourages interested parties to consider attending OGC meetings. Non-members may attend as guests with approval by the OGC.  A limited number of discounted registrations will be provided on a first come basis.

To support the current trend toward more global participation in the OGC’s open standards process, the OGC has responded to requests for a fee structure that gives certain categories of organizations discounts based on their country of registration. These categories include government, academic, research, not-for-profit, individuals, and some for-profit organizations.

OGC standards are being used by governments worldwide to support policy analysis and decision making. Governments are a key driver in the OGC’s efforts to develop global representation through new members in regions including Asia, Africa and South America. Growth has been strong recently among Asia Pacific nations. Governments’ needs for information integration and the ability to share geospatial information within organizations, across organizations and across borders, has increased dramatically in recent years. To meet this need, one element of OGC’s flexible membership pricing approach is GovFuture, a new kind of membership for government agencies operating at the local, state or provincial levels in all countries. GovFuture membership focuses on helping local and sub-national governments implement and use OGC standards to achieve government mission objectives.

The OGC invites all persons interested in Augmented Reality (AR) to attend the two-day meeting of the community promoting open and interoperable AR through the adoption of standards. The AR meeting will be hosted by the OGC in conjunction with member meetings. “The goals of the AR community are very well aligned with the OGC’s and having our meetings co-located will permit us to find opportunities for collaboration,” said Christine Perey, AR meeting co-chair. More details are available on http://www.perey.com/ARStandards/third-international-ar-standards-meeting/. Meeting registration is open: (https://portal.opengeospatial.org/public_ogc/register/ar_workshop.php) and the final meeting agenda will be published May 15, 2011 at (http://www.perey.com/ARStandards/third-meeting-agenda/).

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 415 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. 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/contact.

2 June 2011.  The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) requests reference implementations of the OGC Web Map Tile Service (WMTS) Interface Standard for use in compliance testing.

The OGC Compliance Testing program (CITE) tests whether implementations of OGC standards comply with mandatory elements in the standards. Implementations that pass CITE tests are eligible to pay a Trademark License Fee to use the "Certified OGC Compliant" brand in packaging and marketing.

A WMTS enabled server application can serve map tiles of spatially referenced data using tile images with predefined content, extent, and resolution. WMTS is related to the OGC's Web Map Server (WMS) but is designed to enable better server performance in applications that involve many simultaneous requests. To improve performance, instead of creating a new image for each request, WMTS returns small pre-generated images (e.g. PNG or JPEG) or reuses identical previous requests that follow a discrete set of tile matrices.

Development of abstract and executable tests suites (ETS) for WMTS clients and servers is underway. The current draft of the WMTS abstract test suite is at https://svn.opengeospatial.org/ogc-projects/cite/scripts/wmts/1.0.0/trunk/web

OGC Members with WMTS client and server implementations (and test data if available) are invited to become WMTS CITE Initiative sponsors by making these resources available for free for “black box” testing in WMTS executable test suite development. The first three implementations to pass 100% of the testing process during the release candidate phase will have their Trademark License Fee waived for their first complete annual licensing period.

The OGC is seeking client implementations that run on a Windows platform or are accessed via the Web.

For more information about this opportunity, please visit http://cite.opengeospatial.org/node/70 or contact: Luis Bermudez, OGC Director of Interoperability Certification, lbermudez [at] opengeospatial [dot] org

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 415 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. 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/contact/.

18 May 2011. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announced new membership options for organizations based in emerging economies.

To support the current trend toward more global participation in the OGC’s open standards process, the OGC has responded to requests for a fee structure that gives certain categories of organizations discounts based on their country of registration. These categories include government, academic, research, not-for-profit, individuals, and some for-profit organizations. Discounts are based on world economic indicator data compiled and published by the World Bank.

The OGC is building global representation through new members in regions including Africa, India and South America, as well as through support from the OGC Global Advisory Council. The need for information integration and the ability to share geospatial information within organizations, across organizations and across borders has increased dramatically in recent years. This has been driven by a large number of factors, including the large number of emergencies and disasters worldwide where data sharing is key.

Another element of OGC’s flexible membership pricing approach is GovFuture, a new kind of membership available for government agencies operating at the local, state or provincial levels in all countries. GovFuture membership focuses on helping local and sub-national governments implement and use OGC standards to achieve government mission objectives.

The OGC’s primary mission is to facilitate an inclusive consensus process for the development of open standards. The OGC’s education and outreach activities support this mission and provide additional value to members and stakeholder communities. Visit the OGC Value page to learn more about the value of OGC membership for both technology providers and technology users.

See the new fee schedule and register online at http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/join/levels.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 410 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC 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 useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact

17 May 2010 – The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) invites professionals in local and subnational (county, state, province, etc.) governments to participate in a free webinar: “Location Standards – How Do They Help Government?” The webinar will be held on Thursday, June 2, 2011 at 18:00:00 UTC (2:00 PM EDT). Register for this Directions Media Webinar at https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/996819355.

Government information systems of all kinds can easily integrate simple and complex geographic information from almost any source, thanks to vendors’ implementations of the OGC's technical interoperability standards. 

This OGC GovFuture webinar will show how local and subnational governments are already benefiting from the “organizational interoperability” enabled by technical interoperability. The webinar will provide a case study from a GovFuture Subnational member working on Australia’s Shared Land Information Platform (SLIP) information delivery system, plus a review of pertinent legal and policy issues and an introduction to the OGC. 

During this webinar, you will learn:

• How a commitment to open standards has transformed the way government spatial information is used and shared in Western Australia
• How informed planning can prevent privacy, intellectual property, liability and security issues from derailing data sharing efforts
• How GovFuture membership in the OGC can help governments derive maximum value from geospatial technologies

About GovFuture
The OGC's low-cost GovFuture membership levels focus on how governments can maximize the value of open standards through their access to OGC resources, knowledge and expertise. 

Who should attend
This webinar is for local and subnational government entities worldwide that are ready to maximize the value of  standards that make geospatial information easy to access and use.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 415 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. 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/contact.