24 October 2012. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announced theformation of a new OGC® Technical Committee Standards Working Group (SWG) toadvance the candidate OGC GeoPackage (GPKG) Standard. The OGC members conveningthis group invite the public to comment on the GeoPackage SWG charter (https://portal.ogc.org/files/50347)and will consider comments received before 14 November 2012.
Mobile device users who require geospatial application services andassociated data and who operate in disconnected or limited network connectivityenvironments frequently do not have open, available geospatial data to supporttheir applications. Applications include mobile workforce data capture andupdates, volunteered geographic information, and real time annotations of mapdata in an emergency event.
OGC members are proposing an open, non-proprietary,platform-independent GeoPackage container for distribution and direct use ofall kinds of geospatial data. The GeoPackage container and related API willincrease the cross-platform interoperability of geospatial applications and webservices in the mobile world. StandardAPIs for access and management of GeoPackage data will provide consistent queryand update results across such applications and services.
Future enhancements to the GeoPackage standard, a future GeoPackageWeb Service standard, and modifications to existing OGC Web Service (OWS)standards to use GeoPackages as exchange formats will allow OWS to supportprovisioning of GeoPackages throughout an enterprise or information community.
The OGC is an international consortium of more than 465companies, 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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