OPEN TECHNOLOGY FOR GEOGRAPHIC SERVICES ANNOUNCED

["Deborah Ferazzutti" <list-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

PRESS ANNOUNCEMENT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

For information about this release, contact:

Lance McKee, Vice President, Corporate Communications
Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC) Wayland, MA
tel: +1-508-655-5858
fax: +1-508-655-2237
e-mail: lmckee@xxxxxxxxxxx

OPEN TECHNOLOGY FOR GEOGRAPHIC SERVICES ANNOUNCED

Wayland, MA, USA, August 18, 1999: Maps and map queries will become a much
more important part of the Web thanks to two key interoperability standards
passed by members of the Open GIS Consortium (OGC) on August 13 in
Southampton, England. The standards will make it much easier for
businesses, citizens, and governments to find, view, pan, zoom, overlay,
and query geographical images and maps on the Worldwide Web.

The new OpenGIS Grid Coverages Specification and OpenGIS Distributed
Catalog Services Specification, combined with the already available OpenGIS
Simple Features Specification and technology from OGC's Web Mapping
Testbed, provide the means for unprecedented interoperability between
systems that use geospatial data. In OGC, "Grid Coverages" refers to
satellite images, digital aerial photos, digital elevation data, and other
kinds of data represented in a grid cell or "raster" coordinate system.
"Simple Features" refers to "vector" geodata, digital map information
represented in polygons and lines. "Catalog Services" refers to a common
architecture for online automated directories of geodata and geoprocessing
services, rather like "spatial search engines."

Cadcorp (UK), ESRI (US), Intergraph (US), Laser-Scan (UK), Oracle (US), and
PCI Geomatics (Canada) made up the team that submitted the OpenGIS Grid
Coverages Implementation Specification in response to an OGC Request for
Technology (RFT). PCI Geomatics took the lead in this effort. A grid
coverage interface provides basic image access capability for purposes of
viewing a grid coverage and performing certain kinds of analysis, such as
histogram calculation, image covariance and other statistical measurements.
(Most such image operations await the OpenGIS Image Exploitation Services
Specification, which is in progress in OGC's Technical Committee.) The
specification supports the GeoTIFF file format, various color models,
variable value sequencing and pixel ordering, and all standard grid
geometries and spatial referencing systems (consistent with geometries and
spatial referencing in the OpenGIS Simple Features Specification).

In Southampton, Cadcorp (UK) was applauded for its demonstration of a
client application accessing and manipulating grid coverage data from
multiple vendors' servers through interfaces on the client and servers
which conform to the new OpenGIS Grid Coverages Specification.

Bob Moses, President of PCI Geomatics, said, "The simple maps and Earth
images you've seen on the web up until now don't really show what's ahead.
Geospatial technologies are so specialized and hard to integrate that they
haven't been part of most peoples' information environment. Now that's
going to change. We are adding 'where' to the kinds of questions the web
can answer."

The OpenGIS Distributed Catalog Services Implementation Specification
specifies standard interfaces for online geospatial resource discovery and
access services. Submitters of this specification included: Blue Angel
Technologies (US), ESRI (US), Geomatics Canada (Canada Centre for Remote
Sensing (CCRS)), Intergraph (US), Marconi Integrated Systems (UK), MITRE
(US), Oracle (US), U.S. Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC), U.S.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and U.S. National
Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA). Other contributors included: Compusult
Limited (Canada), GEODAN IT bv (Netherlands), HJW (US), Joint Research
Centre - European Commission, and SICAD Geomatics (Germany).

Software systems with interfaces that conform to the Catalogs specification
will be able to:

-- Discover network-based geospatial information resources in a
distributed heterogeneous computing environment.

-- Create and maintain discoverable geospatial catalogs and catalog entries.

-- Create and maintain discoverable collections of geospatial datasets,
including a metadata set and metadata entities associated with each stored
dataset.

-- Discover the content and structure of geospatial resources.

-- Allow use of metadata entities and elements, including any subset of the
metadata currently defined in the ISO TC211 15046-15 draft document on
metadata. Also: associate metadata with individual datasets, a series of
datasets, and individual features within a dataset as currently defined in
the ISO working document.

-- Perform query (or selection) operations supporting discovery and access,
including spatial, temporal, text, and/or numeric values, Boolean
operations, spatial queries (e.g., intersect, contains, contained by,
within, beyond, etc.); and thus deliver identity of resources (e.g.,
catalogs and sets of geographic features) as a result of the query.

-- Retrieve complete or partial forms of geodata resources, including
entire geospatial datasets or geographical subsections of datasets,
returned to the requestor as a file or set of files.

The catalog specification will simplify the lives of current users of
geodata and enrich the capabilities of current applications. But many in
OGC believe its greatest impact will come in the development of a much
larger market for specialized geodata and geoservices, and the emergence of
a "spatially aware" Internet.

David Schell, President of OGC, said, "Various vendors are already offering
products that conform to the OpenGIS Simple Features Specification, and we
anticipate that many more will soon be productizing interfaces conforming
to all three released specifications. Knowledgeable buyers are demanding
interoperable products, and end users will be amazed at the variety and
value of the geographic information and services these products make
available."

The complete OpenGIS Grid Coverages Implementation Specification and
Catalog Services Specification will be released to the public on OGC's web
site (http://www.opengis.org) next year, after final editing and a brief
period during which the specification is available exclusively to
Consortium members.

OGC is an international, not-for profit organization working toward
integration of geospatial capabilities into the world's information systems.

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