OGC UK and Ireland Forum

Friday, 17 July, 2009

I attended the the OGC UK and Ireland Forum today which was an interesting experience. OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) should be well known to all as the over arching industry body that defines geospatial standards (GML probably being the most well known). Perhaps what many won’t realise is that OGC has been around since 1994 and has been very active in in the geospatial arena, almost mirroring the W3C in terms of timeline but has, arguably, been far more successful.

Anyway, the Forum rolled out the big guns in the form of Mark Reichard (CEO) and David Schell (Chairman). And whilst the “advert” for the day didn’t really make it clear, but this was a “big” relaunch of the Forum. OGC are clearly very keen to promote the fact that it is an international organisation and whilst it is there as a group to define standards and disseminate, it is driven by its members and there are very specific cultural/legal perspectives. Local Fora are therefore intended to provide this focus.

What does that actually translate in to?? Key areas were persistant test beds, accessibility to data/software for testing, translation of standards in to “meaningful” real world case studies, persistance of information. The list can become quite large and fails to recognise “consumers” and what they can use OGC standards for. There is clearly some further discussion needed to facilitate the forum but I think it was a good start. Steven Feldman offers a more pessimistic view which I can understand as, in the intervening 4 years since the last UK Forum, the consumer has really laid down the gauntlet in terms of what they want from geospatial web services. And the insatiable deman for (government) geospatial data is only increasing. With the ineviable IPR relating to this whole area (particularly with commercial interests), this point in time may prove a tipping point (and I guess its telling that KML was taken on as an OGC standard for this very reason).

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