OGC Adopts GeoPackage Standard for Mobile

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has adopted the OGC GeoPackage 1.0 (GPKG) encoding standard. The GeoPackage standard is developed to make it much easier to exchange and share geospatial (or location) information across different devices, applications and web services throughout the mobile world.

GeoPackage was developed for mobile application developers whose applications need to provide users with geospatial application services and associated data in disconnected or limited network connectivity environments, or whose applications depend on geospatial data and processing services from diverse sources. GeoPackage supports a wide variety of applications such as those that involve creation of geospatial data products in enterprise computing environments, data product distribution to other computing environments, mobile workforce data capture and updates, and volunteered geographic information.

From a technical perspective, the GeoPackage standard defines an open, non-proprietary, platform-independent SQLite container for distribution and direct use of geospatial data, including vector features and tile matrix sets. This approach simplifies development and gives applications access to a very wide variety of web-based geoprocessing services.

The OGC GeoPackage (GPKG) encoding standard has been developed by OGC members with additional participation by interested developers on GitHub, a web-based hosting service for software development projects. The OGC GeoPackage encoding standard and associated resources can be found here. All OGC standards are free and publicly available.