Features

A Common Map

The Open GIS Consortium (OGC) is a not for profit voluntary consensus standards organization whose vision is a world in which everyone benefits from geographic information and services made available across any network, application, or platform. The role of the OGC is to provide a forum and process for solving interoperability issues in the geospatial domain, according to Carl Reed. This includes data, service, and application interoperability. The result of the work of the OGC is a set of documented and membership approved interface specifications that are then provided as royalty free and publicly available documents.

The Open GIS Consortium has been working to define interface specifications that, at a technical level, enable near real time data sharing. Our Web Map Service, Web Feature Service, Web Coverage Service and Geography Markup Language specifications are specifically targeted to solve the spatial data interoperability problem. Using these interface specifications, any application client can seamlessly access multiple spatial data repositories independent of location and format - as long as they are accessible via the Internet and the repositories themselves have been enabled with the appropriate OpenGIS interfaces.

Reed says there are many benefits to defining and providing standards that enable interoperability. For one, the use of standards increases market breadth. Another is that they enable implementation of applications that are easily extensible, future proofed, and lower risk. "They enable relatively quick and efficient access to legacy databases without costly reformatting and re-engineering," according to Reed.

Some members of the Open GIS Consortium have taken compatibility into their own hands. Autodesk, Intergraph, MapInfo and Laser-Scan have announced an initiative to enable their respective off-the-shelf products to interoperate more seamlessly via Oracle Spatial. The Oracle Spatial open enterprise database is used in thousands of enterprise, state, and national GIS, and digital mapping applications across the globe. Each vendor will offer an Interoperability Kit with their products that will simplify data access and data sharing.

"At the enterprise level the use of Oracle as the spatial data storage system is becoming nearly universal across the GI vendors," according to Laser-Scan's Peter Woodsford. He says this Interoperability Initiative delivers guaranteed client-neutral access to spatial information stored in Oracle.