Blogs

The Global Atlas is the largest initiative ever undertaken to assess renewable energy potential on a global scale. See the Global Atlas video. 

As we celebrate OGC’s 20 year anniversary, with great sadness we learned that Cliff Kottman passed on Wednesday 26 March 2014 after a long illness. Cliff was brilliant, creative, deeply analytic and just as wise and sensitive to others as he was smart. He was a great teacher. Even before the OGC came into existence, he contributed to the development of the OGC vision, and he had the ability to put the rather complex vision of geospatial interoperability in easy to understand terms.  Those who remember Cliff may recall his many white papers on the subject and his famous

Last week's GeoPackage Webinar, produced by Directions Media, drew 940 registrants, and 406 of these attended live. In a questionnaire, most of the registered geospatial information managers, developers and practitioners surveyed reported that they plan to use software that implements the OGC GeoPackage Standard that was first announced last month.

The OGC Catalogue Services (OGC CS) Standard establishes a general framework for implementing geospatial catalogue services that can be applied to meet the needs of stakeholders in a wide variety of domains.

Suppose you are interested in displaying, or processing, international historical data from some period in the last few centuries using OGC Map Services or other standards. Scanning the available data, you or volunteers or legions of underpaid students have extracted some interesting series of data. And you realise that some of the data is labelled 10, 11, 12 or even 13 days out. This is because various countries switched their calendars from the Julian calendar, established by the Roman emperor, Julius Caesar, to the

The Met Ocean Domain Working Group of OGC is now approaching its 5th birthday - it was established in 2009 at the OGC Athens Technical Committee, transformed itself from just 'Meteorology' to 'Meteorology & Oceanography', and persuaded everyone that Climatology is a subset, so did not need a separate interest group like Hydrology.

OGC was formed by a few exceptional people – David Schell, Ken Gardels, Kurt Buehler, Carl Reed and a few others – who had a vision of how much more value to society geospatial data could have if only the sources of data and the software services used to manipulate it could be made to work together simply and straightforwardly without the complexity, time-wasting and cost of working with multiple bespoke formats and interfaces. They not only had the foresight to see this opportunity but the insight, skills and determination to make vision become fact. 

The OGC was formally founded in 1994 after a long series of meetings organized to discuss possibilities for opening up and growing the geospatial market. In the 20 years since those first meetings, membership has grown annually and the OGC has continuously evolved its process to better meet member needs in a rapidly evolving market. Agreements on process change have sometimes resulted in adjustments to the organization's goals and structure, and they have very often resulted in changes to the Technical Committee Policies and Procedures.

The OGC is off to a good start on another year of work with the international aviation information systems community. Earlier this month the tenth annual OGC Web Services testbed activity (OGC Testbed 10) kicked off, with Aviation as one if its main "threads". The AAtS (Aircraft Access to System Wide Aviation Management (SWIM)) Request for Information is out, and the SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) MOSIA consortium work is underway.