OGC announces new Discrete Global Grid Systems Standards Working Group

12 March 2014. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®)announces the formation of a new OGC Technical Committee Standards WorkingGroup (SWG). The purpose of this SWG will be to explore and propose terms for astandard to enable interoperability through the use of Discrete Global GridSystems (DGGS). The OGC members convening this group invite the public tocomment on the DGGS SWG charter ( https://portal.ogc.org/files/57326 )and will consider comments received via email to: charter-requests ATopengeospatial.org before 11 April 2014.

Unlike thewidely used coordinate reference systems that represent the Earth as acontinual lattice of points, a DGGS represents the Earth with a tessellation ofnested cells. A DGGS is designed to ensure a repeatable representation ofmeasurements that is better suited to today's requirements and technologiesthan our legacy coordinate systems that were designed for repeatable navigationand manual charting.

There is explosive growth of both the variety and thevolume of interesting spatial data and processing resources, along with agrowing understanding of the tremendous societal benefit that can be derivedfrom enabling interoperability between them. On the other side of this deluge of spatialcontent is a growing demand by end-use decision-makers for a participatoryenvironment where content can be accessed directly from diverse contributorsand usedwith other content without reliance on time-consuming and costlypre-integration processes.

One of the core contributions of a DGGS is geospatial fusion on demand.Ina multiple provider environment, fusion is only possible with an informationsystem architecture based upon open standards. There is a need for thedevelopment of a standard to enable interoperability within and betweenDiscrete Global Grid Systems and to promote reusability, knowledge exchange,and choices between different data sources and architectures.

The DGGS SWG will consist of interested parties fromacross a broad range of the geosciences, academic institutions, and commercialand government organizations that are involved with or interested in thedesign, development, implementation or use of Discrete Global Grid Systems.

The conveners of the DGGS SWG are Matthew Purss of GeoscienceAustralia, Perry Peterson of PYXIS Innovations Inc. and Robert Gibb of LandcareResearch New Zealand. 

The following Charter Members support this proposal andare committed to the Charter and projected meeting schedule. Others may jointhis list before the SWG is officially chartered.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 470companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universitiesparticipating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatialstandards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that”geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, andmainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatialinformation and services useful with any application that needs to begeospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

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