The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) invites you to attend the inaugural Location Powers Summit on 2nd December 2014 in Tokyo, Japan. The focus for this first event will be understanding the location and place needs for a Smart City. The day’s journey will see us test our assumptions of what a Smart City is, explore the role of the citizen, look at how we “see” a Smart City, the fundamental infrastructure and how we understand a Smart City.

To guide us through the day we have enlisted an international team of experts to discuss Smart Cities “location intelligence”: These include:

  • Carsten Rosendorf, Middle East advisor at Ordnance Survey International and global expert in 3D and City modelling. He will discuss how OGC’s CityGML Standard provides an organizing framework for the spatial and semantic understanding of urban structures and their uses.
  • Steve Liang, Professor at the University of Calgary in Canada and, the lead in the development of the SensorThings standard. SensorThings builds on the established OGC Sensor Web Enablement standards. Sensors and crowdsourcing of city conditions is a necessary step to smart cities.
  • Rich Carne, recently appointed Chief Digital Officer at MetOffice in the United Kingdom looking at ways to work with cities, transport and citizens to collect and deliver smart weather & climate information
  • Michi Kohno from Creative City Designers, Tokyo, will share his experience in developing indicators for sustainable cities including city services and quality of life in how we architect the Smart Cities of the future.
  • Plus representatives from across Asia’s Smart Cities initiatives – announcements to follow.

Two important new OGC standards will be introduced at the Location Powers: Smart Cities Summit. These standards will become indispensable elements of how Smart Cities share their location information:

  • Ryosuke Shibasaki of the Center for Spatial Information Science, The University of Tokyo, is the convenor and chair of the OGC Moving Features Standards Working Group. He will conduct the world’s first real-time demonstration of the new candidate OGC Moving Features Standard, which gives developers a lightweight and open standard way of tracking moving features.
  • Ki-Joune Li of the Pusan National University, convenor and chair of the IndoorGML Standards Working Group, will present the recently approved OGC IndoorGML Encoding Standard, which gives developers an innovative and easy open standard way of encoding indoor spaces for navigation purposes.

The Location Powers Summits are hosted by the OGC, whose members have been making the world’s location standards for over 20 years. In addition to informing stakeholders about the power of understanding location, the Summits are also designed to inform future work within the consortium so that we can continue developing relevant and useful standards. This summit is part of our quarterly Technical Meetings for the Asia Pacific region and will be followed by 3 further summits in 2015: Sustainable Development; Location & the Citizen; and Mobile, Sensors & High Velocity. More information and registration details can be found at www.locationpowers.net. Join us and help shape the way cities utilise location information.

The OGC is an international geospatial standards consortium of more than 495 companies, government agencies, research organizations and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services and mainstream IT. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/.