Two global organizations, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the InLocation Alliance (ILA), have begun working together to advance indoor positioning capabilities.
While outdoor navigation is common place, much work is still needed to exploit the full potential of indoor Location Based Services supported by reliable and affordable indoor location positioning systems. ILA members are actively pursuing a common architectural framework supporting the delivery of complex solutions featuring indoor location determination, mapping and navigation. The OGC provides a standards forum in which indoor location stakeholders are working together to develop open standard ways of communicating the indoor location information provided by those solutions.
Open standards from OGC and ISO (International Organization for Standardization) have become the dominant standards for communicating outdoor (“geospatial”) data and information. With standards like IndoorGML and CityGML, the OGC has already provided elements of the necessary indoor location standards infrastructure.
Jouni Kämäräinen, Board Chair of the InLocation Alliance is “very glad to publish this Liaison Agreement with OGC. When the ILA published the System Architecture white paper for indoor positioning solutions in September, 2014 we welcomed close collaboration with relevant SDOs. ILA sees OGC as a key standardization organization for building information modelling, which is an essential element for superior consumer experience and high quality applications.”
George Percivall, Chief Engineer, Open Geospatial Consortium stated that “Indoor is the new frontier of spatial information – a frontier that needs sharable maps. The remarkable new technologies that determine indoor locations and map indoor spaces need to be able to communicate spatial coordinates and space identifiers (room type, building floor, ownership, restrictions etc.) in a standard way to serve many types of applications. The OGC is very pleased to be working with ILA to advance the state of indoor location.”
About the InLocation Alliance – Formally established August 2012, and a member program of the IEEE-ISTO Federation, the InLocation Alliance is an industry collaboration dedicated to promoting indoor positioning solutions that directly benefit the industry and users of indoor location services and solutions on mobile devices. http://www.inlocationalliance.org.
About the OGC® – The OGC® is an international geospatial standards consortium of more than 500 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/.