[SDI-Europe] OGC and EuroGeographics cooperate to advance European SDI

[Kate Lance]

OGC PRESS ANNOUNCEMENT FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
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28 September 2011 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) and
EuroGeographics recently signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to
promote interoperability through open standards to benefit the
European geospatial community.  The two organizations both seek
to promote compatible, standards-based Spatial Data Infrastructures
(SDI) from the local to global level, and the OGC is positioned to
help EuroGeographics support a broad range of European stakeholders
responding to Europe's  INSPIRE Directive
[http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ ] .

Both organizations will work cooperatively on outreach and
communications to raise the awareness, acceptance, and implementation
of open standards and related educational programs and best practices.
This will include activities such as participation in international
webinars; publishing papers on implementations; documenting Return on
Investment; and examination and discussion of legal and policy issues
associated with the use of spatial information and associated
technologies. The two organizations will also work to identify, plan
and convene joint workshops, conference sessions and symposia.

In addition, EuroGeographics and the OGC will seek funding and in-kind
resources to advance joint OGC testbeds, pilot projects, and
interoperability experiments, with a focus on advancing the  European
Location Framework [http://share-psi.eu/papers/eurogeographics-2.pdf ].

"As an international standards organization, OGC recognizes the
importance of regional requirements for interoperability," said Mark
Reichardt, President and CEO of the OGC. "This partnership will help
OGC better understand and address the interoperability challenges
facing leading mapping, land registry and cadastre organizations
across Europe as they work to provide timely, accurate and useful
geospatial information in support of a range of local to international
challenges."

"With technology driving geographical information into the mainstream,
the development of SDIs to underpin services is crucial and this
partnership will play an important role in maximising the use and
benefits of the authoritative, definitive and high quality data
provided by our members,” commented EuroGeographics’
Secretary General and Executive Director, Dave Lovell. “It
builds upon a well established and productive relationship between the
two organizations, most recently seen in an interoperability
experiment built on the ESDIN project’s best practice, which
demonstrated that Shibboleth, which is open source software based on
open standards, can be used to set up secure geospatial services that
comply with the INSPIRE Directive and OGC standards."
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