The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is pleased to announce that the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has raised its membership level from Technical to Strategic – OGC’s highest level of membership.
FAA joins the likes of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), US Geological Survey (USGS), US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), European Space Agency (ESA), GeoConnections/Natural Resources Canada, and Ordnance Survey UK to actively shape the future of location-based standards and improve their utility for decision-makers across the globe.
As a Strategic Member, FAA will participate in OGC’s Planning Committee to provide leadership through the exploration of market and technology trends to ensure that OGC’s activities remain effective and agile in a changing technology environment. FAA will also participate in final approval decisions for all OGC standards and nominations to the Board of Directors. Further, FAA will work with other Strategic Members as part of an OGC Strategic Member Advisory Committee to help identify and advance high priority areas of interoperability concern.
OGC CEO Nadine Alameh commented “It’s great to see the FAA joining other OGC Strategic Members to lead the way in making location information Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). As the amount of aeronautical, weather, and flight information increases, so does the need for data standards that ensure its syntactic and semantic interoperability.
“OGC is delighted that the FAA appreciates the value of standards, and is eager to use all that OGC membership has to offer – including access to our agile Innovation Program and community of experts. OGC is excited to work with the FAA to advance standards in support of the global System Wide Information Management (SWIM) modernization movement, where safety in decision-making is of the utmost concern”
The FAA has long been a supporter of international collaboration. As such, the FAA has been a close partner of OGC via earlier leadership in OGC’s Aviation Domain Working Group and its sponsorship (via requirements, data, and funding) of eleven Innovation Program initiatives since 2008.
By utilizing the OGC Innovation Program, the FAA (alongside EUROCONTROL) have helped advance and promote interoperability concepts around all three XMs (AIXM, WXXM, FIXM) and the underlying web service architecture components for access, discovery, filtering, processing, and visualization. The outcomes of the Aviation threads of OGC’s Innovation initiatives have been successfully incorporated into SWIM Segment 2 requirements as well as ICAO SWIM guidelines.
