The Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC) announces the achievement of a major milestone in Geo-processing and information technology — the completion of a multi-vendor standards-based Geo-Spatial data and services portal, along with a comprehensive portal architecture designed to serve as a community-wide template for advancing Geo-Spatial portal capability and capacity worldwide. This open Geo-Spatial portal implementation validated OGC’s portal architecture as a mechanism for helping technology developers, as well as organizations interested in sharing Geo-Spatial data and services, to rapidly extend their existing systems, or to establish new systems capable of efficient integration with growing national, regional and global spatial data infrastructure environments. Using nothing more than a Web browser, users of the portal can readily publish, discover, access, integrate and apply a wide variety of heterogeneous Geo-Spatial data and services, involving both local and remote sources, distributed throughout the Web environment. At a recent demonstration of these innovative portal capabilities for senior government officials and project sponsors, the approach and functionality were applauded as “light years ahead” of anything presently in operation. The associated “portal architecture”, based on a design philosophy compatible with that of the US Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) is well positioned to support future construction of a national infrastructure of interoperable portal capabilities. Mark Forman, the Office of Management and Budget’s Administrator of E-Government and IT, said, Open standards-based architectures are needed for government to achieve better results from a broad variety of technology and E-Government applications. We look forward to working
with OGC in creating open standards based solutions that better serve state and local government and ultimately the citizen. OGC’s work in support of the Geo-Spatial One-Stop Initiative shows that we can achieve true interoperability in the near term. The OGC portal approach is truly a community resource that organizations around the world can use to make their data and Geo-processing services more accessible and reusable. The OGC portal and associated architecture are the product of a recent U.S. Government contract to design and validate a comprehensive, multi-vendor Geo-Spatial portal and associated architecture. Based on proposals received in response to an OGC Request for Quotation late last year, a broadly-based, team of commercial developers and service
providers was selected to participate, including the following OGC member companies: Autodesk, Compusult, CubeWerx, Galdos Systems, Intergraph, Northrop Grumman Information Technology TASC, PCI Geomatics, Oracle, Questerra, SAIC and Sapient Technology.The interoperable architecture that OGC has delivered represents a significant resource that will allow government, citizens, industry and academia to share critical Geo-Spatial information and Geo-processing services more efficiently and effectively and will accelerate successful development of vital services associated with both E-Government and Homeland Security. The OGC portal effort was managed within OGC’s Interoperability Program, a global, collaborative, hands-on engineering and testing program that rapidly delivers proven candidate specifications into OGC’s
Specification Program, where they are formalized for public release. In OGC’s Interoperability Initiatives, international teams of technology providers and users work together to solve specific Geo-processing interoperability problems posed by the Initiative’s sponsoring organizations.
