Two records were broken in Delft this March: not only was OGC’s 128th Member Meeting our biggest ever – with over 300 representatives from industry, government, and academia attending in-person (and over 100 virtual) – but the meeting also saw a record number of motions for votes on new Standards, highlighting the very productive activities undertaken by the OGC community in recent months. Held in Delft, Netherlands from 25-28 March, 2024, OGC’s 128th Member Meeting brought together global standards leaders and geospatial experts looking to learn about the latest happenings at OGC, advance geo ..read more

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has announced Ecere Corporation, represented by Jérôme Jacovella-St-Louis, as the latest recipient of the OGC Community Impact Award. The award was presented last night at the Executive and VIP Dinner of the 128th OGC Member Meeting in Delft, The Netherlands. The Community Impact Award is given by OGC to highlight and recognize those members of the OGC Community who, through their exceptional leadership, volunteerism, collaboration, and investment, have had a positive impact on the wider geospatial community. Gobe Hobona, OGC Director of Product Management ..read more

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is excited to announce that registration is open for OGC Innovation Days Europe. Held in conjunction with FOSS4G Europe 2024, on July 1-2, in Tartu, Estonia, the event will focus on themes of Climate and Disaster Resilience, One Health, and the corresponding Data Spaces. Registration is available here. OGC Innovation Days Europe seeks to address stakeholders’ and policymakers’ need for digital solutions that can meet their requirements efficiently and in a user-friendly way. To this end, the event will bring internationally leading software development and ..read more

OGC holds three Member Meetings each year – one each in Europe, the Americas, and Asia Pacific – where OGC’s Standards Working Groups (SWGs), Domain Working Groups (DWGs), Members, and other geospatial experts meet to progress Standards, provide feedback on initiatives being run by the OGC Collaborative Solutions and Innovation (COSI) Program, hear about the latest happenings at OGC, network with the leaders of the geospatial community, and see what’s coming next. The meetings are open to the public, though there are some closed sessions, and provide a great way to start to get to know – and g ..read more

The pace of technological change is increasing as new products are made available, with ground-breaking innovation often resulting in disruptive change. Coupled with this technological change is the explosion of data from new sources relevant to the geospatial domain, including imagery, sensor feeds, and real-time tracking data. Organisations in the public, private, and third sectors must remain agile and resilient to thrive in this emerging landscape. Adoption of new technological innovations into large, controlled IT enterprises can be challenging, because of associated costs, integration ch ..read more

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) invites developers to the 2024 OGC API – Coverages Virtual Code Sprint, to be held February 13-15, 2024. Registration is free and open to the public. The Sprint will focus on refining the OGC API – Coverages – Part 1: Core candidate Standard. OGC API – Coverages enables clients to efficiently retrieve a subset of spatiotemporal data for a given time, area, and resolution of interest through a simple Web API.  Typically, this data is returned in a gridded format such as netCDF, GeoTIFF, CoverageJSON, or CIS JSON, although this also extends to other cove ..read more

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is excited to announce the formation of the OGC GeoZarr Standards Working Group (SWG). The new SWG will develop a Zarr encoding for geospatial gridded data in the form of Zarr conventions. Zarr is a cloud-native data format for n-dimensional arrays that enables access to data in compressed chunks of the original array. Zarr facilitates portability and interoperability on both object stores and hard disks.  As a generic data format, Zarr has increasingly become popular to use for geospatial purposes. As such, in June 2022, OGC endorsed Zarr V2.0 as an O ..read more

At the end of another year of prototyping software, experimenting with data access, and debating how to overcome geospatial technology’s many challenges, teams from OGC member organizations gathered in Washington DC to share 2023’s work and help OGC decide what challenges we should address in 2024. Representatives of government agencies and industry – from FEMA and Natural Resources Canada, to Intact, Canada’s largest insurer – highlighted their successes, current needs, and aspirations. Through panel discussions, demos, and conversations over coffee, teams from startups, like FloodMapp and Na ..read more

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), Apache Software Foundation (ASF), and Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) are pleased to announce the date of the 4th annual Joint OGC ASF OSGeo Code Sprint as February 26-28, 2024. As a hybrid event, the face-to-face component will be held in Casa Cordovil-Universidade de Évora (Évora, Portugal), while the virtual component will be held via the OGC Events Discord server. Registration for the code sprint is free and open to the general public here. The code sprint will be hosted by Universidade de Évora, NaturalGIS and Geobeyond. Catering will be spo ..read more

With great sadness, OGC announces the passing of our cherished colleague, Mr. Jeffrey Burnett of Littleton, Mass, on 28 November 2023, from cancer. Jeff joined OGC as Vice President for Operations and Finance in April, 2000, serving as OGC’s Chief Financial Officer and member of the Board of Directors until his retirement in 2020.  In the 20 years prior to joining OGC, Jeff held product management positions in the emerging imaging and high-performance computing market with Digital Equipment Corporation and the Massachusetts Compu ..read more