OGC and OASIS Announce Progress on Standards

18 March 2008, 8:37am

Boston and Wayland, MA, USA - Progress on ongoing collaborative efforts was announced today by two international standards consortia, the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) and OASIS (the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards). The groups have fostered an active commitment to cooperation since signing a Memorandum of Agreement in 2006.

"OASIS Standards enable a broad set of capabilities, and OGC's standards apply wherever 'where' and 'when' are included," explained Mark Reichardt, President and CEO of the OGC. "For the members of both organizations and for the broader global community of IT developers and users, it's important that the two organizations work together to strengthen open standards-based interoperability."

"OGC brings value to both the front and back ends of OASIS work," noted James Bryce Clark, director of standards development at OASIS. "They actively participate in a wide range of OASIS technical committees, ensuring that the business requirements of the geospatial community are represented in the standards development process. Once OASIS Standards are approved, OGC champions their adoption by designing geospatial extensions and profiles."

The groups point to Web services as a key area of their cooperation. With the existing OGC Web Services (OWS) standards, most of the standards needed to publish, discover and use web-resident geospatial data and services on the Web are in place. However, OWS must work in concert with other Web services standards.

That's why OGC members approved the ebRIM (electronic business Registry Information Model) OASIS Standard as the preferred cataloging meta-model foundation for future application profiles of the OpenGIS Catalog Service Web (CS-W) Standard.

In the security space, the recently approved OGC GeoXACML standard represents a spatial extension of the XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language) OASIS Standard. GeoXACML was developed in close collaboration with the OASIS XACML Technical Committee.

OGC also plays an active role in the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee, which works to advance the fields of incident and emergency preparedness and response. This committee developed the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) and Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL), OASIS Standards. OGC members helped define a GML application very similar to GeoRSS GML for use in CAP and EDXL, as well as in other specifications under development including the Extensible Address Language (xAL), and Hospital Availability Exchange (HAVE).

The OGC's Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards reference CAP and other relevant OASIS alerting standards including the OASIS Web Services Notification (WS-N) and Asynchronous Service Access Protocol (ASAP) specifications. The OGC works with OASIS to harmonize these standards with the SWE specifications.

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Geo: International