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Lance McKee
Vice President Corporate Communications
Open GIS Consortium, Inc.
35 Main Street, Suite 5
Wayland, MA 01778-5037
USA
Tel. +1 508-655-5858
Fax +1 508-655-2237
[log in to unmask]
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OGC ANNOUNCES FURTHER PROGRESS TOWARD OPEN GEOPROCESSING
Wayland, Massachusetts, USA, February 27, 1998 - The Open GIS Consortium, Inc.
(OGC) announced today that two important new Requests For Proposals (RFPs)
were approved February 12, 1998 by the OGC Technical Committee and OGC
Management Committee at meetings of these committees in Munich, Germany.
110 attendees representing 66 organizations and 14 countries were present.
These most recent OGC bimonthly meetings were hosted by Siemens Nixdorf
Informationssystemes (SNI) (Munich, Germany), a Principal Member of OGC.
The RFPs, which will be posted on OGC's public web site
(http://www.opengis.org) early in March, request the submission of proposed
detailed engineering specifications for software interfaces which implement
recently completed parts of OGC's OpenGIS Abstract Specification.
Interfaces that conform to OpenGIS Implementation Specifications resulting
from such submissions will enable diverse geoprocessing software systems to
communicate directly, which will enable complex geospatial information to
become an integral part of modern network-based information systems.
One of the two recent RFPs is called the Grid Coverages RFP. It goes the
next step beyond the first OpenGIS Implementation Specifications for Simple
Features. The previously released Simple Features Implementation
Specifications provide standard methods for systems to communicate simple
geometry, spatial reference system, and attribute information. OpenGIS Grid
Coverages Implementation Specifications will provide standard methods for
systems to create and share additional types of geospatial information.
New categories of information introduced include elevation matrices, raster
structures, digital images, and other structures using a grid of points
with attached values as their foundation. (OGC coverages are similar to
objects commonly called "fields" in college GIS courses.) Important
coverage categories addressed by this RFP include satellite images, scanned
maps, digital elevation models, and computer map displays. Consensus
interfaces on these objects will enable diverse systems to interoperate in
performing tasks such as merging, interpolation, resampling, evaluation,
and map algebra analysis.
The other RFP approved for release last week is the Catalog RFP. OpenGIS
Implementation Specifications for Catalogs will provide standard methods
for publishing and discovering information about network-resident geodata.
OpenGIS Implementation Specifications for Catalogs create a foundation, for
example, for interoperable geospatial "search engines" which will provide
information about network-resident geodata resources, just as Web search
engines provide information about html-formatted text and simple images.
Queries to geospatial catalogs might typically consist of a specified place
name, area or point location and a specified information theme, such as
roads, hotels, or population density. The information returned would
consist of a list of geodata servers that contain the specified
information, together with metadata that will help the user to select the
most appropriate sources.
Both RFPs ask for implementation specifications that will enable developers
to build interfaces for software running on any of the common distributed
computing platforms (DCPs), such as OLE/COM and CORBA. Different DCPs
require slightly different specifications, but OGC is designing the
specification to provide as much interoperability between DCPs as possible.
Submitters are expected to be teams of geospatial software vendors,
database software vendors, and others who can contribute to the necessary
technology and supporting infrastructure needed to implement the vision of
the OpenGIS Abstract Specification.
The meetings in Munich were attended by many Europeans responding to OGC's
appeal for European participation. On Friday, there was a well-attended
OGC and ISO TC/211 ad hoc technical working session. Significant progress
was made at this session by reviewing each work item of ISO TC/211, and
establishing action items and responsibilities that will help bring the two
organizations' specifications into alignment.
The Open GIS Consortium is an international organization of 118 members
engaged in a cooperative effort to create open computing specifications in
the area of geoprocessing. OGC envisions the full integration of
geospatial data and geoprocessing resources into mainstream computing and
the widespread use of interoperable, commercial geoprocessing software
throughout the information infrastructure.
-- end --
Lance McKee
Vice President Corporate Communications
Open GIS Consortium, Inc.
35 Main Street, Suite 5
Wayland, MA 01778-5037
USA
Tel. +1 508-655-5858
Fax +1 508-655-2237
[log in to unmask]