The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. will host "EU funded Projects and the OGC: Standards, Benefits and Implementations", an OGC Interoperability Day to be held at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research, Fraunhoferstrasse 5, 64283 Darmstadt, Germany.
To efficiently deal with societal, environmental and economic challenges in our increasingly complex world, current and accurate information is the single most important aspect. The key that enables such information access in the first place is standardisation. It is the definition of common interfaces and terminology between heterogeneous systems that enables interoperability. A decision maker who needs to to retrieve information shouldn’t need to know about the underlying nuts and bolts of distributed and often proprietary IT solutions.
Geospatial information is playing an increasingly integrated role in mainstream IT. On regional, national and pan-European levels, Spatial Data Infrastructure projects have been implemented to guarantee an efficient and effective use of geographical information to face these challenges. The OGC’s international standards enable interoperabilty between geospatial systems and facilitates the seamless integration of these systems into mainstream IT solutions.
The European Commission long ago anticipated the relevance of geospatial information as a core building block for a well informed information society and funded a great number of related projects in the framework programmes. Through direct as well as indirect involvement in several of these projects, many European agencies and companies have introduced geospatial interoperability into the standardisation process. Likewise, many project partners have learned about the benefits of actively engaging in the standardisation process and becoming OGC members.
A representative from the European Commission will open the day’s events with an insightful view of the Commission’s future programs, their relation to other organisations like GEO and how OGC standards are taken into account by the funding programs.
OGC is actively involved in a number of high profile projects. OGC’s Director of European Services, Athina Trakas, and European Programs Director Martin Klopfer will explain how OGC Membership can help organizations and companies build successful proposals and support R&D work in EC-funded projects.
For more information please visit www.opengeospatial.org
