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GIS OGC

Open Geospatial TC meeting in Rocketville

Marshall Institute

It is not often you get driving instructions which use Rockets as landmarks, but picking up my hire car I was told to turn of the highway when I went passed the Saturn V !

Huntsville is very much a town with technology at it’s heart, home to the Marshall Space Centre, and numerous defence companies including from the world of GI, Intergraph.

Yesterday was the first day of the Technical Committee meeting of the OGC, I try to attend at least one a year, although the OS is always represented. For the newcomer the consensus approach of a standards organisation can appear to be mind-numbing, with formal processes and much intense study of detailed technical documentation. From this intense work however has come the key standards for geospatial interoperability, the Web Map and Feature Services and Geographic Mark-up Language.

It can be argued that OGC standards are less relevant with the emergence of GMY’s popular and proprietary mapping applications. However the counter argument to this is that all this applications are really only as good as the data in them, and once you start wanting to obtain more local information from 3rd party sources, interoperability will become a real issue, and Google are attending their first OGC meeting here in Huntsville.

The real challenge for the OGC will be to see our quickly it can adopt a rapidly developing standard that is emerging from the blogosphere GeoRSS – more details later this week – watch this space !

Written and submitted from The Marriott Hotel, Huntsville, using the hotel in-room internet connection.

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