13 February 2014 – The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has adopted theOGC GeoPackage (GPKG) Encoding Standard. The GeoPackage standard will make it much easier to exchange and sharegeospatial (or location) information across different devices, applications andweb services throughout the mobile world.

GeoPackage was developedfor mobileapplication developers whose applications need to provide users with geospatialapplication services and associated data in disconnected or limited networkconnectivity environments, or whose applications depend on geospatial data and processingservices from diverse sources. GeoPackage supports a wide variety of applicationssuch as those that involve creation of geospatial data products in enterprisecomputing environments, data product distribution to other computingenvironments, mobile workforce data capture and updates, and volunteeredgeographic information.

From a technical perspective, the GeoPackage standard defines an open, non-proprietary,platform-independent SQLite container for distribution and direct use of geospatial data,including vector features and tile matrix sets. This approach simplifiesdevelopment and gives applications access to a very wide variety of Web-basedgeoprocessing services.

The OGC GeoPackage (GPKG) Encoding Standard has been developed by OGCmembers with additional participation by interested developers on GitHub, a web-based hostingservice for software development projects. The OGC GeoPackage Encoding Standard andassociated resources can be found at http://www.geopackage.org/. All OGCstandards are free and publicly available.

Learn more about this standard at our free workshop during Mobile Week in Barcelona, Tuesday 25th February. Register for the workshop and other sessions at http://myogc.org/go/mobile2014

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 470 companies,government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating ina consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standardssupport interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wirelessand location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empowertechnology developers to make geospatial information and services accessibleand useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visitthe OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.