OGC Press Releases

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

Wayland, Mass., November 24, 2008 -  The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC(R)), the Fisheries & Marine Institute of Memorial University of Newfoundland, and the Alliance for Coastal Technologies organized a one day workshop "From Sensors to Applications: Advancing the Interoperability of Ocean Sensors." The workshop was convened as part of the Ocean Innovation 2008 "World Summit - Ocean Observing Systems" Conference October 19-22 in St. Johns, Newfoundland. Workshop attendees included ocean sensor manufacturers, researchers and government officials in the ocean observation community.

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

Wayland, MA, November 24, 2008.   The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC(R)) and GeoConnections announce the release of a video that documents last year's successful interoperability demonstration, a major output of the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure Interoperability Pilot (CGDI IP) (http://www.geoconnections.org/en/communities/developers/technologies/fa=developersCorner.cgdiv2).  GeoConnections sponsored the Pilot, which concluded with a Web Conference that was witnessed live and online by more than 500 people. GeoConnections is a Canadian partnership program whose primary objective is to evolve and expand the CGDI. The CGDI IP was an OGC Interoperability Initiative.

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

November 17, 2008, Wayland, Massachusetts.  The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) announced the completion and availability of Version 2.0 of the OGC Reference Model (ORM) at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/orm. The ORM provides a framework for the ongoing work of the OGC and a guide for those who seek to implement interoperable solutions and applications for geospatial services and data. The ORM focuses on relationships between the documents in the OGC Standards Baseline (SB), which consists of the approved OpenGIS® Abstract and Implementation Standards (Interface, Encoding, Profile, Application Schema) and OGC Best Practice documents.

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

November 10, 2008, Wayland, Massachusetts. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) completed a successful kick-off meeting October 14-17 for the OGC Web Services, Phase 6 (OWS-6) Interoperability Initiative, a testbed to advance OGC's open interoperability framework for geospatial capabilities.

The organizations sponsoring OWS-6 seek to develop and improve on the open standards for their interoperability requirements.  The content of the OWS-6 initiative is organized around the following threads:

1. Sensor Web Enablement (SWE)
2. Geo Processing Workflow (GPW)
3. Aeronautical Information Management (AIM)
4. Decision Support Services (DSS)
5. Compliance Testing (CITE)

The list of sponsors and details about the content of the threads are available at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/50. Teams of participants -- vendors, integrators and universities -- will work in each of these areas to develop candidate standards and best practices that will be featured in an interoperability demonstration in the summer of 2009. For more information, contact David Arctur at darctur@opengeospatial.org.

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

November 10, 2008, Wayland, Massachusetts. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) announced that Dr. David Arctur has been appointed as a Director, Interoperability Programs for the Consortium.  In his new position, Dr. Arctur plans and manages OGC Interoperability Initiatives which include testbeds, pilots and experiments - all designed to develop, test and validate new standards that promote improved access to and application of geospatial information in decision making.  As part of the OGC's Interoperability Program team, Dr. Arctur is leading the sixth OGC Web Services (OWS-6) Interoperability Initiative, a major testbed activity.

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

Wayland, Mass., October 28, 2008 - Standards developed by the members of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) play a key role in OneGeology (www.onegeology.org ), a global project to produce the first digital geological map of the world. OneGeology is supported by UNESCO and six other international umbrella bodies. It is the flagship project for the UN International Year of Planet Earth 2008.

OneGeology is made possible by standards. For example, GeoSciML (http://www.geosciml.org/ ), is a Web-based geoscience encoding standard developed by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) (www.iugs.org/ ) Interoperability Working Group. GeoSciML is an "application schema" of GML (http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/gml ), the OGC's OpenGIS(R) Geography Markup Language Encoding Standard (GML - ISO DIS 19136) for representation of geospatial features and geometry, and GeoSciML also uses the OpenGIS Observations and Measurements (O&M) Encoding standard (http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/om). In addition to GeoSciML, OneGeology uses the OpenGIS Web Map Service Interface Standard (http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/wms) and other OGC standards. Without such standards, geology data clients and servers around the world would not be able to interoperate across the Web as OneGeology nodes.

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

October 20, 2008, Wayland, Massachusetts. The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) announces a webinar on leveraging XML in geoint applications. The Geography Markup Language (GML) encoding standard is used as a key example.

This free webinar is scheduled from 1:30 - 2:30 pm EDT on Thursday, October 23, 2008.

Dr. Carl Reed, III, Chief Technology Officer of OGC, is one of the speakers. Joe Francica, Editor-in-Chief of Directions Media, and Chris Biow, Chief Technologist of Mark Logic Corporation, are also on the panel. The webinar will be moderated by Mike Agron, Executive Advisor of Directions Media. Directions Media is hosting the event, which is sponsored by Mark Logic Corporation.

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

Wayland, MA, USA, September 30, 2008.  At the September meeting of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC(R)) in Norcross, Georgia, Terry Fisher received an OGC Lifetime Achievement Award.

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

Wayland, MA, USA, September 30, 2008.  At the September meeting of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC(R)) in Norcross, Georgia, Dr. Mike Botts received the OGC's tenth annual Kenneth D. Gardels Award (http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/awards). The Gardels Award, a gold medallion, is awarded to individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to advance OGC's vision of geospatial information fully integrated into the world's information systems.

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

September 30, 2008, Wayland, Massachusetts. The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) announced today that OGC members Blue Marble and 1Spatial have released the results of the OGC Spatial Data Quality Survey. The results are now available at http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=30415.