OGC Blog

Peter Rushforth discusses the development of proposed new standards for spatial information, ones that leverage the architectural style of the Web in order to lower the barriers to use and re-use of not only SDI, but also potentially any spatial information on the Web. Firstly describing what you can easily do today with Map Markup Language, or “MapML”, and then presenting ideas how links between and within Web pages and maps of the future could be as seamless and useful as links on today’s Web.

The core GeoPackage provides a base set of tables to store geographic, raster, feature, and attribute data. While maps contain the same information, more is expected from the output to make it consumable. For GeoPackage, this can be enabled through extensions.

As many readers are aware, OGC has been making a concerted effort over the past few years to integrate better with the community implementing OGC standards. OGC members and staff believe that by involving those who actually need to code against standards early in the process, we can develop standards that are both more responsive to market demands and more accessible (read: “easier to understand and implement”) for developers. Hence, why not try a hackathon?

The upcoming OGC TC/PC Meetings in Orléans, France (19-22 March 2018), will host the final presentations and awards ceremony of the next installment of the INSPIRE series of hackathons: the Orléans/OGC INSPIRE Hackathon 2018.

Newly developed technologies further the democratisation of geospatial information and applications.

2017 was an exciting year for OGC, welcoming our first Community Standards, as well as successful initiatives related to some of the geospatial industry's biggest growth areas.

In 2017, OGC's Innovation Program officially changed its name from the Interoperability Program and crossed the '100th initiative' milestone. In this time, I also came on as its new Executive Director.

The future of mapping is coming — or is it here already? With the advent of Indexed 3D Scene Layers (I3S) as a community standard, everyone stands to benefit.

It is an exciting time to be joining OGC as Director of Knowledge Management (DKM). One of the reasons why I am very excited about this is that geospatial interoperability standards are increasingly seen as the key ingredient for allowing much in society to be better understood.

An OGC GeoPackage is a portable database that may contain raster maps and imagery, vector features, and elevation data. GeoPackages are optimized for sharing and displaying these types of geospatial data on mobile mapping systems, and GeoPackage extensions may be developed to support additional types of geospatial data such as routing networks. This blog post will discuss what GeoPackage extensions are, how they are developed, and how they can provide new geospatial capabilities to meet the requirements of a diverse user base.