OGC Hosts Location and Floor Plan Standards Forum

18 January 2010, 7:39pm

Wayland, MA, 18 January 2010.On December 8 in Mountain View, California, the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) held a special session of the OGC 3DIM (3D Information Management) Domain Working Group to bring together professionals representing standards development organizations and activities working on encoding standards for indoor location and routing, floor plans, and other built environment information. Such standards are needed for applications such as emergency management (EM), outdoor/indoor navigation, and augmented reality. Among the groups represented were the OGC, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) GeoPRIV Working Group, the Open Floor Plan initiative, the OASIS EM Technical Committee, buildingSMART allianceTM, the Korean Spatial Awareness initiative, and the ISO TC 211 Dynamic Position Identification Scheme for Ubiquitous Space (u-Position) activity.

A major focus was the Open Floor Plan Display Project, which addresses firefighters' urgent need for simple floor plans of burning buildings. Most other applications require additional complexity, such as encodings that describe units of measure, coordinate reference systems, spatial relationships, location determination methods, and various kinds of metadata. Discussion focused on standards approaches that would be simple, compatible with emerging standards for more comprehensive building information and indoor navigation models, and easily deployed in solutions that require minimal input from building owners.

Presenters and attendees explored the OGC CityGML Encoding Standard; IndoorML; indoor spatial awareness research; proposed Interior Location Extensions to the IETF's proposed PIDF-LO standard; and the Open Floor Plan Display Project of Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley and the Golden Gate Safety Network.

About the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®)

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 385 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OpenGIS® Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website below.

Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®)

Geo: International