We Remember with fondness the incredible life and contributions of Lance McKee
The OGC family has lost a cherished friend and impassioned supporter of the use of location information and open standards for good. We recently learned of Lance McKee’s passing from his daughter Caitlin. He died peacefully at the age of 72 from a chronic illness. His intellect, kindness, and compassion for the OGC vision and mission, and the use of location information to improve our society and environment, has left a deep imprint on the OGC and each of us who had the privilege of knowing him.
Only July 28 and 29, 2020, OGC hosted a virtual sprint to advance the OGC API - Maps candidate standard, one of many APIs being rolled out by the organization to revolutionize how location information is accessed and shared across the industry. Sponsored by Ordnance Survey, participants prototyped implementations of the draft OGC API - Maps - Part 1: Core standard, identifying missing requirements, and documenting these requirements so that the candidate standard could be improved. 
Like so many nations, New Zealand is engaged in a contentious game of environmental tug-of-war. On one side, ecological enthusiasts who want to preserve and protect the country’s lush, otherworldly landscape, which is beloved by visitors and locals alike for its majestic mountains, verdant valleys and bewitching beaches. On the other side, economic opportunists who want to capitalize on the country’s natural resources in order to make New Zealand as productive as it is pretty. Along with arable land and precious mineral deposits, the rope on which Kiwis on both sides are constantly tugging comprises the country’s most valuable commodity: fresh water.
Within the DEMETER project, one pilot is concerned with - and for - the smallest of all commercial livestock: the honeybee. Bees aren’t the first animal that springs to mind when one thinks about livestock and farming. Yet for such tiny creatures, they have a huge impact on sustainable and economical agriculture.
Outlining some important changes relevant to any software implementors that access EPSG Coordinate Reference System (CRS) definitions through the OGC Definitions Server coming next month.
Through the Agriculture Domain Working Group, Horizon 2020 European Commission funded projects such as CYBELE and DEMETER, and other OGC Innovation Program initiatives, OGC supports the development, implementation, and use of open standards and best-practices that maximize interoperability in Smart Agriculture with the aim of keeping humanity fed at a time of unprecedented environmental and cultural change.
As part of OGC's Open Routing API Pilot, participants developed an API that allowed requests for routes from different users in an interoperable and standardized way via Web protocols. In this first of a series of blog posts, Ignacio "Nacho" Correas, Chief Technology Innovation Officer at Skymantics, summarizes Skymantics’ experiences and findings in building an interoperable routing engine using OGC standards. 
Like almost every event in 2020, due to the COVID-19 crisis, OGC’s 115th Member Meeting was completely virtual. Yet despite the change, more than 400 people from across the world logged on between 15–22 June 2020 (with three Working Groups meeting on June 10 & 11) to attend the meeting. Using a combination of GoToMeeting and Gitter, participants joined in on community discussions, presentations, panels, casual ‘lunch break’ chats, and special sessions on health, simulation & gaming, smart roads, insurance, OGC APIs, and more.
Further testing and refinement to the 
The sheer volume of complex 3D data now available has created challenges concerning access, processing, visualization, and dissemination. Challenges that Cesium believes can only be addressed by engaging with and supporting a community of collaboration and a diverse, interoperable software ecosystem powered by consensus-based open standards.
