10 December 2010 – The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announces adoption and avail­ability of the OGC Georeferenced Table Joining Service (TJS) Implementation Standard, Version 1.0. The TJS standard is available for free download at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/tjs.

The OGC TJS standard defines an interface for services that provide the ability to join attribute data stored in one database on a network with corresponding geometry (points, lines, or polygons) stored in another network accessible database.

For example, a table on one server may indicate the population of various cities, while a second server may contain the geometry that describes the cities' locations and boundaries. The TJS standard describes a set of interfaces for both servers that allows the city name to be used as the “common geographic identifier” in order to join the population data to its geometry, thus enabling mapping and geospatial analysis of the tabular data. An earlier draft of this standard was titled the “Geographic Linkage Service”.

The TJS 1.0 submission team includes representatives from the following OGC members:

  • Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
  • EDINA, University of Edinburgh
  • Natural Resources Canada
  • Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (CREAF)
  • University of Leeds
  • University of Zaragoza

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 400 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.