OGC Press Releases

23 January 2012, Wayland, Massachusetts. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) is pleased to announce that PIXIA Corporation has raised their OGC membership level to Principal Member. PIXIA has been an active member in the OGC since 2006, contributing to progress in several OGC Technical Committee working groups.

PIXIA plans to increase the extent of their participation, working with other OGC members to advance standards and best practices related to rapid data access in the areas of geospatial imagery, wide area motion imagery (WAMI), and full motion video (FMV). 

The Consortium’s Principal Members exercise influence over the development, release and adoption of OGC standards through their voting rights in the OGC Planning Committee. They also provide valuable industry expertise to support the forward-thinking market strategy of the consortium.

“PIXIA’s move to Principal Membership in the OGC reflects the importance of standards in the broader industry effort to turn image data into knowledge,” said Mark Reichardt, President and CEO of the OGC.  “Their technical commitment to the development and market application of open standards is deeply appreciated, and we are excited that they will be playing an increasing role in advancing the market and policy direction of the consortium as a Principal member.”

Rahul Thakkar, VP of Technology for PIXIA, said, “As the lead advocate for the WAMI web services specification, PIXIA has invested considerable effort in promoting OGC interoperability and research in innovative solutions.”   

About PIXIA

PIXIA provides high-performance scalable data access solutions for Big Data. Its core technology focuses on increased storage Input/Output (I/O), scalability and interoperability to power data to be accessed anywhere within a Cloud environment. Three product lines, HiPER LOOK©, HiPER STARE© and HiPER WATCH^tm, provide a broad range of options to address geospatial and video enterprise storage needs.

PIXIA Corp. is a commercial software company based in Sterling, Virginia, USA. 

Learn more about PIXIA at http://www.pixia.com.

About the OGC

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 430 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 January 2012. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announced the formation of a new OGC Technical Committee Standards Working Group (SWG) to advance the candidate OGC IndoorGML Standard. The OGC members invite the public to comment on the SWG charter (https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=47562 ) and will consider comments received before 10 February 2012.

This SWG aims to provide a common schema framework for interoperability between indoor navigation applications, which cover a wide spectrum of application areas such as indoor LBS, indoor web map services, indoor emergency control, guiding services for visually handicapped persons in indoor space, and indoor robotics. Several commercial services for indoor spatial information have been recently launched such as Google Maps and Bing Indoor Maps. In order to meet the market demands from these application areas, we need indoor navigation information as an essential component. There are also strong demands for indoor navigation information from other standardization organizations including ISO/TC204 and IEEE RAS to extend existing standards to cover indoor space as well as outdoor space in a seamless way.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 430 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.

16 January 2012. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC(R)) Board of Directors has unanimously elected The Honorable Jeffrey K. Harris as Chairman of the Board of the Open Geospatial Consortium.

Mr. Harris succeeds OGC Founder David Schell, who will continue to serve as Chairman Emeritus.  Jeff has been an OGC director since 2003 and a member of the Board's Executive Committee.  He has been a key participant in the Consortium's strategic and business planning processes and an influential spokesman for OGC and for the benefits of open standards in both the public and private sector enterprise worldwide.

Jeff Harris has had a long and distinguished career spanning nearly 35 years in the space industry.  He recently retired from Lockheed Martin, where he served as President of Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space and President of Lockheed Martin Special Programs.  Mr. Harris also served as President of Space Imaging Corporation, the first company to commercially provide high-resolution satellite imagery and information products of the Earth for cost-effective solutions to today’s global business needs. Prior to joining the private sector, he served with distinction in senior leadership positions in government.  He is now a private consultant to both industry and government on geospatial and space technology programs.

Jeff Harris has a deep understanding of and commitment to the OGC mission.  He also knows the industry, the technology and user needs; he's uniquely qualified to bring the OGC into a larger sphere of influence.  "I am excited and honored to serve as OGC Chairman," he said.  "David Schell has set the bar high for leading this organization into the future, and I look forward to working with him, as well as the entire board and our first-rate staff.  The OGC engine room is clearly defining the international standards that both enable and accelerate the adoption of tools and technology across the entire geospatial spectrum.  The Consortium’s work has been critical to the seamless delivery of discoverable content, ranging from individual users to industry and government, which will be increasingly important as we address future challenges.  I welcome the opportunity to be a part of this journey.”

As Chairman Emeritus, David Schell will continue to be actively involved with the OGC board and will serve as chief strategist for the organization, focusing on resource strategies and strategic relations.  Schell commented:  "For the last 25 years I have been working to make geospatial interoperability a reality. I was fortunate that so many talented people shared my vision and dedicated themselves to do what I could never have done alone. I am very proud of what we have accomplished, and I am equally proud that an executive and visionary of Jeff Harris' stature and proven leadership has agreed to assume OGC's Chairmanship. Jeff Harris and OGC CEO Mark Reichardt comprise a unique leadership team that will ensure the continuation of OGC's innovative role in the standards community and future recognition as a laboratory for spatial information policy and decision support processes."

"I look forward with great enthusiasm to working with David and Jeff," said Mark Reichardt. "We all owe David Schell a tremendous debt for creating and growing this organization and bringing together the team that we have, including our distinguished international board of directors. I'm delighted that David will continue working with us, and that we will continue to move forward under Jeff’s leadership."

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 430 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/.

7 December 2011 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate OGC GeoSynchronization Best Practices Document. 

Frequently, geospatial content providers must collaborate with outside entities to collect new data and/or update their existing data holdings. This may be the case, for example, when municipal, state/provincial and/or federal agencies synchronize their data with closest-to-source providers. Another case is when content providers are crowdsourcing (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing) elements of their data production or supporting volunteer geographic information (VGI).

This candidate OGC Best Practice describes how to use the OGC's open interface and encoding standards to implement services that mediate interaction between geospatial data providers, the content repositories, and the external entities acting as data collectors. Such services support data entry with validation, notification of changes to interested parties and replication of the data content submitted to multiple repositories.

This document defines an OGC Best Practice on a particular technology or approach related to OGC standards. This document is not an OGC standard and may not be referred to as an OGC standard. It is subject to change without notice. However, this document is an official position of the OGC membership on this particular technology topic.

The following organizations submitted this Best Practice to the OGC: The Carbon Project, OpenGeo.org and CubeWerx Inc.

The candidate OGC GeoSynchronization Best Practices document is available for public review and comment at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/84.  Submit comments on the candidate Best Practices document to requests [at] lists [dot] opengeospatial [dot] org. The comment period ends January 7, 2012. 

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 430 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 December 2011 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate OGC Gazetteer Best Practices Document.

There is growing interest in the development of a common feature-based model for geographic names databases, often referred to as gazetteers. This candidate OGC best practice describes the Gazetteer Service Application Profile of the OGC Web Feature Service Interface Standard.

This document is an OGC Best Practice on a particular technology or approach related to the use of OGC standards.

The following organizations submitted this Best Practice to the OGC:

• CubeWerx Inc.
• Intergraph Government Solutions
• The Carbon Project
• US Army Corps of Engineers Army Geospatial Center (AGC)
• US Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC)
• US Geological Survey (USGS)
• US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)

The candidate OGC Gazetteer Best Practices Document is available for public review and comment at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/83.  Submit comments on the candidate Best Practices document to requests [at] lists [dot] opengeospatial [dot] org. The comment period ends January 6, 2012.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 430 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.

November 10, 2011 – The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announced that it will hold its next OGC Technical Committee and Planning Committee meetings (http://www.opengeospatial.org/event/1111tc) from 28 November - 2 December 2011 at Eurocontrol headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. The meeting is being hosted by Eurocontrol and sponsored by Comsoft, Luciad, and Snowflake Software.

"Eurocontrol, the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, is honoured to host the event and we look forward to an even closer coordination with OGC to serve existing and forthcoming aviation information management needs," said Paul Bosman, Manager System Wide Information Management / Enterprise Architecture, Eurocontrol.

The OGC's open standards are widely used to enable communication of digital geographic and location information. The OGC is a consensus-based and member-driven organisation whose members are companies, government ministries and offices, non-governmental organizations, research organisations and universities. Membership in the OGC is growing faster in Europe than in any other region. 202 of the OGC's current 438 members are European.

The public is invited to attend an "Interoperability Day" and special workshops on INSPIRE, the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE), and the Internet of Things. An OGC Nordic Forum will be officially established at the Brussels meeting. The Augmented Reality Markup Language (ARML) 2.0 Standards Working Group will hold its first face to face meeting since it was chartered in September.

Many emerging ICT markets and technologies involve location and sensors, and the value of investments in these areas ultimately depends on a supportive standards infrastructure. The special "Internet of Things" workshop will explore the role of OGC in the broader development of the emerging Internet of Things. The workshop will include IoT presentations by several organizations and discussion of how the IoT will make use of OGC standards for location, sensor webs, 3D spatial models and location-enabled mobile services.

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.

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. The OGC invites inquiries and participation. 

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 430 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.

7 November 2011. During the well-attended OGC 3D Summit in Boulder, Colorado the first ever OGC 3DIM Award was given to the 3D Pilot NL, a unique network of over 65 private, public and scientific organizations who collaborated to push 3D developments in the Netherlands. The four national organizations who succeeded in establishing this collaboration network are the Kadaster, Geonovum (the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) executive committee in the Netherlands), the Netherlands Geodetic Commission and the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment. With this award the 3D Pilot team is recognized for its significant accomplishments in aligning national and international standards for 3D content data sharing. The pilot project established the groundwork for one of the world's most comprehensive national 3D geo-information programs.

The mission of the OGC 3D Information Management (3DIM) Domain Working Group is to facilitate the definition and development of standards for sharing and accessing 3D geo-information. According to members of the Working Group, “The developments in the Netherlands serve as an inspirational example of a national implementation of a 3D standard.”

3D Pilot NL

The objective of the 3D Pilot NL was to accelerate the use of 3D geo-information in the Netherlands. Initiators of the 3D Pilot NL were Kadaster (Dutch national cadastre and mapping agency), Geonovum (the National Spatial Data Infrastructure executive committee in the Netherlands), the Netherlands Geodetic Commission and the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment. More than 65 private, public and scientific organizations collaborated on use cases and a test bed to study the establishment of a national standard on 3D geo-information.

Added value of 3D over 2D information 


The pilot has demonstrated the added value of 3D geo-information compared to 2D geo-information in various use cases, including interactive airstream simulation, 3D cadastre, mutation detection and integrated planning and management of underground and aboveground municipal assets. Also, 3D information automatically generated from laser point data can serve many application domains. Such information about tree heights and sizes, new buildings, roofs, etc. can easily become part of an OGC CityGML model. Demonstrations of use cases can be found at www.geonovum.nl/dossiers/3dpilot/bibliotheek/presentaties#films (on Youtube).

Standardization 


One of the main achievements of the pilot was the establishment of a national 3D standard based on an international standard. The Netherlands' 3D standard integrates the OGC CityGML Encoding Standard with a new version of the existing national Information Model for large scale Geo-information (IMGeo). IMGeo contains object definitions for large scale representations of roads, water, land use/land cover, bridges, tunnels etc. and prescribes 2D point, curve or surface geometry for all objects. As the new version of IMGeo will be completely integrated with CityGML,  IMGeo version 2.0 will also facilitate 2.5D and 3D geometries. The close integration between an existing information model for 2D geo-information and CityGML is a major step toward the practical use and re-use of 2D and 3D information.

3D Pilot continues

The next phase of the 3D Pilot NL started in October 2011. This phase focuses on the development of tools and instruments to support the implementation of the 3D standard. This includes generating IMGeo 2.0 example data at various levels of detail; describing standard procedures to generate such data; describing standard procedures to update and maintain the 3D data as part of existing (2D) information processes; and developing a 3D validation tool. In addition, special attention is being paid to aligning standards from the construction domain (Building Information Models) and the spatial data domain, at both national and international levels. Almost 120 participants have subscribed to participate in this next phase (www.geonovum.nl/dossiers/3d-pilot/deelnemersvervolg).

More information

More information is available in Dutch at www.geonovum.nl/dossiers/3dpilot/resultaten1 and in English at: www.geonovum.nl/sites/default/files/3d_pilot_artikel_engels_2.pdf and www.geonovum.nl/dossiers/3dpilot/congres/english.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 430 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.

Nov. 4, 2011 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) announce the WhereCon 2012 conference, to be held April 10-12 2012 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC. Online registration for WhereCon 2012 is open and seating is limited. Visit www.wherecon.com for more information. 

WhereCon is the event for public and private sector decision makers to gather and begin a new dialogue on the synergies that location-enabled and place-based streams of information activity bring to every sphere of our lives. The question of “Where?” is increasingly becoming the organizing principal for how public and private sector enterprises get their jobs done.

"New location technologies are fundamentally changing the way business and government organize and make decisions.  At the same time, such technologies and the spatially-enabled data they produce are posing profound and vexing public policy challenges that society must tackle," said Mark Reichardt, president and CEO of the OGC. "We've organized WhereCon so people can hear the stories of public and private sector leaders who are showing us what the place-based future will look like."

USGIF President Keith J. Masback added to that, “The ’power of place’ has never been more evident, and its relevance to the whole of the US government in terms of increased efficiency and effectiveness is unquestioned. The explosive growth in interest in the geospatial dimension of our national security is increasingly shared by decision makers in civilian government and in private sector industry. That is why the USGIF is partnering with the OGC to bring the promise and challenges of place-based decision-making to this larger national and global community. This is a critically important discussion, right now, for the future of the Nation."

For a comprehensive list of topic areas and an up-to-date list of speakers, please visit www.WhereCon.com. You can also keep up to date with the latest news and offers on Twitter via @WhereCon2012, Facebook and LinkedIn. We'll look for you there! 

About the Organizers:

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) (www.opengeospatial.org) is an international consortium of more than 430 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.

The United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) (www.usgif.org) is an educational non-profit established to promote the geospatial intelligence tradecraft and to develop a stronger community of interest between government, industry, academia, professional organizations and individuals who share a mission focused on the development and application of geospatial intelligence to address national security objectives.