OGC on preventing more silos of information

13 October 2008, 8:54pm

OGC President's message for October

Every Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Standards Development Organization (SDO) - and its members - ought to do everything in its power to make sure that its standards fit with and are complementary to other standards in the ICT world.

This requires that we, as an SDO, look outside our box, that we find ways for our business models to allow us to work on issues that cross
SDO boundaries. It means that our members have an obligation as well, an obligation to help steer requirements across SDOs. A number of OGC
member organizations have memberships in multiple SDOs.

Cross-membership provides additional opportunities to influence SDOs' agendas and additional ways to leverage the value of each
membership. Members can get more out of their memberships if they identify and promote ways for their SDOs to work together. With every
organization taking a high level strategic standards view, looking at how its needs can best be met in the overall ICT standards context, the end result of our efforts will be stronger than we could achieve working in isolation. We also need to encourage the public to comment on inter-SDO issues.

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IETF - Internet Engineering Task Force - http://www.ietf.org/
[http://www.ietf.org/]

OASIS - Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information
Standards - http://www.oasis-open.org/ [http://www.oasis-open.org/]
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The OGC has worked to partner with other SDOs to comprehensively address location. We can point to the inclusion of GML in the IETF's Presence Information Data Format (PIDF), Next Generation 9-1-1 and in various OASIS standards, to mention just a few examples.
Our collaborations have involved discussions among staff of the different SDOs, and they have involved SDOs working together in consensus activities, including testbeds as well as working groups, to ensure that work products of these joint efforts flow back to the "owning" SDO organizations for further action. The OGC's 3D, AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) and sensor work offer some good examples of this kind of collaboration. Our GeoXACML (Access Control for Geospatial Data) and GeoRM (Geospatial Rights Management) activities have also benefited from this kind of inter-SDO communication and collaboration.

Nothing succeeds like success, as the saying goes. We have created reliable standards processes that are increasingly receptive to collaboration across SDO boundaries on interoperability issues that none of us can solve alone. We are fortunate to work with a range of SDOs on important issues that involve a geospatial or location component. We are also working to share our process experience with other SDOs, particularly in the area of testbeds and pilots, so that these initiatives can have sufficient "policy and process interoperability" to allow us to work together effectively and efficiently to solve increasingly complex problems. We are fortunate to be working with buildingSmart alliance TM and these sponsors:

- Associated General Contractors of America
- American Institute of Architects
- Burt Hill
- Ellerbe Becket
- Gilbane Development Corporation
- HOK
- Large Firm Round Table
- Statsbygg (Norway)
- US National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST)
- US General Services Administration
- Webcor Builders

in a collaborative AECOO-1 (Architecture / Engineering / Construction / Owner / Operator) testbed - not to address geospatial issues, but to share our knowledge about how to corral diverse stakeholders and run a process that brings value to them all. As our collective understanding improves, we will no doubt turn our focus on addressing the range of interoperability issues surrounding the convergence of AEC and geospatial information to support a range of visualization, analysis and modeling.

Businesses and leading government and academic players in our geospatial technology industry want to make sure that location is addressed consistently across the standards stack. The best way to do this is by joining OGC, of course. But these companies, agencies and research groups can further help themselves and the industry if they also participate in other standards activities, with an eye toward "connecting the dots" between standards that are important to them.

Mark Reichardt
President, Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

Geo: International