4 June 2014.The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®)membership has formed the Mobile Location Services Domain Working Group (DWG).The new group will replace both the existing Mass Market and OpenLS workinggroups. In an effort to better reflect the current technology market this newDWG will be focused on interoperability in a number of key areas includingmobile, Internet of Things (IoT), SensorWeb, Points of Interest, AugmentedReality, geofencing and related location services.

The kick-off meeting of the new MobileLocation Services DWG will be at the June 2014 TechnicalCommittee meeting in Geneva,Switzerland.

The Mobile Location Services DWG provides a forum for both OGC members andinterested non-members to review the requirements of the growing mobile andlocation services industry and make recommendations for OGC's development and adoptionof open standards to improve interoperability. What has changed in the marketis the explosion in applications for mobile devices, the emergence of cloudcomputing, and the availability of new and emerging OGC interface and encodingstandards and best practices that greatly expand the data and services optionsavailable to developers.

In recentOGC Testbeds, the Open Mobility and Cross Community Interoperability technologythreads produced Engineering Reports that address location for mobile apps,security, semantics and information architecture. Further detail andimplementation guidance can be found in these comprehensive reports. Some ofthe Public Engineering Reports that are available now are:

Watch the OGC Public Engineering Reports page for other Testbed-10 Engineering Reportsthat are now in the final stages of editing. (Click on “Date” in thetable's heading row to see the most recent reports.) Topics include, forexample:

  • Performance of OGC Services in the Cloud
  • OpenMobility and GeoPackage
  • OGC Web Service integration
  • Cross-Community Interoperability
  • OWS Context in requests based on the USNational Information Exchange Model (NIEM)

The OGCMobile Location Services DWG also supports and encourages other OGC workinggroups to make progress on various key services and encodings, and seeks theiradvice on topics of mutual interest.  Someof the OGC standards that are particularly relevant to Mobile Location Servicesare:

Pendingstandards and OGC working groups that are particularly relevant to MobileLocation Services include:

Developersworking in areas of mobile and location services application development areencouraged to investigate these OGC standards and follow and participate in theactivities of the OGC Domain Working Groups and Standards Working Groups whose work impacts their developmentobjectives.

The OGCMobile Location Services DWG will support and help focus the OGC's ongoingcollaboration with OGC Alliance partners such as:

At therecent Mobile World Congress event, the OGC's GeoPackage and IndoorGML workshops andan Augmented Reality interoperability demo were well attended. These workshops were organized with theparticipation of members of the Mobile Location Services DWG.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 475companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universitiesparticipating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards.OGC standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” theWeb, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. Visit the OGCwebsite at http://www.opengeospatial.org/.

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