OGC Geospatial Rights Management (GeoRM) Summit

07 May 2009, 9:17am

Wayland, Massachusetts.The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) invites participation in an OGC Geospatial Rights
Management (GeoRM) Summit to be held June 22, 2009 at the Stata Center at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Geospatial data and services -- Earth images, GIS, map browsers, location services, navigation, etc. -- have become an integral part of our information environment. But this progress raises issues of security, public access, intellectual property, and emergency use of geospatial information. The issues are complex because geospatial data products are often composed of data from multiple sources which may have different rights and restrictions associated with them. Thus, business and policy issues, not technical issues, are now the industry bottleneck.

"The OGC's Geospatial Digital Rights Management Reference Model (GeoDRM RM) provides a framework that enables much more than today's ‘all or nothing' protection," explained Graham Vowles, chair of the GeoRM Working Group of the OGC Technical Committee. "This has important implications for governments and scientists whose data would have far more value if the data could be readily shared."

"Standards based on the GeoDRM RM will open up many new opportunities for geospatial data and geoprocessing service businesses," said Mark Reichardt, the OGC's president and CEO. "We are holding this summit to give multiple stakeholder communities an opportunity to see how they
can benefit from developing and using GeoRM standards."

GeoRM Working Group

OGC GeoRM Summit information

Geo: International