OGC’s 110th Technical Committee Meeting: Onwards, Standards!*
Trevor Taylor, Director, Member Services - Asia & the Americas, takes readers through all the exciting happenings from the recent OGC TC Meetings held in Singapore. The meeting was hosted by NUS, sponsored by the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) and the Maritime and Ports Authority of Singapore (MPA), and included a special Monday evening reception sponsored by the UK Ordnance Survey. In addition to the many Working Group meetings, this TC Meeting featured OGC's First Marine Summit and an Integrated Digital Built Environment (IDBE) Summit, as well as a meeting of the OGC Asia Forum.
OGC’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) is responsible for developing OGC’s Technology Strategy and coordinating the strategy across all programs of the Consortium. Currently the main activities of the strategy relate to the OGC Architecture Board (OAB), OGC Technology Forecasting, and the evolution of the OGC Baseline. This column provides an update on those and related activities from the past three months.
Testbed-14, the biggest Innovation Program initiative executed by OGC in 2018, came to an end last week at ESA/ESRIN in Frascati, Italy with a final demonstration. 
2018 was another productive year for OGC, as well as a year of adaptation to a rapidly changing global location information and technology marketplace. I am writing to share with you a few of our major accomplishments in 2018.
Braving heavy snowfall, and overcoming subsequent flight delays, more than 140 key standards leaders from industry, academia, and government attended last week’s Technical Committee (TC) Meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA. The meeting was hosted by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). This TC Meeting also featured an Energy Summit, a special IndoorGML-hosted open session, a wrap-up of the Environmental Linked Features Interoperability Experiment (ELFIE), and more.
With geospatial technologies becoming increasingly mainstream, there has been a growing need for OGC to provide a way for individuals to prove their expertise in the application of OGC standards. As such, OGC staff have been developing the infrastructure required to deliver an OGC e-Learning program that includes certification of successful completion of examinations that focus on OGC standards. Enrolment will begin on December 17, 2018.
GeoPackage is often seen as a container that stores geospatial information, but at its core, GeoPackage is simply a SQLite database. This opens up a realm of possibilities to interact with and exploit its contents. We can incorporate advanced analysis into our data, or augment with other data types like basemaps, elevation, and other forms of media, all within the same package.
After 7 years, an OGC Technical Committee (TC) meeting has again come to Germany, this time from the 10-13 September 2018 in Stuttgart - more or less the backyard I grew up in. More than 200 people attended our 108th TC Meeting, held at and hosted by the Hochschule für Technik Stuttgart (HfT Stuttgart). 
In September 2018, the OGC/WMO Hydrology Domain Working Group (HDWG) held its ninth annual workshop marking ten years of successful collaboration between the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and OGC in hydrology and informatics. The working group has generated interoperability experiments, engineering reports, discussion papers, best practice documents, and four approved OGC standards - part of the WaterML2 suite. 
After almost 18 years with OGC, 14 years as President, I plan to transition to part-time work with OGC early next year. In my new capacity, I will focus on strategic opportunity development in the areas of membership value and growth, and the advancement of key programs and initiatives in support of OGC’s technology and marketplace priorities.
