A growing number of European organisations have adopted or are planning to adopt open standards developed by internet, government, industry and international organisations. Organisations dependent on geospatial information are making similar transitions to standards developed by the ISO and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).

Maturity
Several European organisations have provided leadership in standards adoption, often ahead of their counterparts in the US: The Czech Republic Land Survey, which publishes using the OGC Web Map Service (WMS); Ordnance Survey Great Britain, an early adopter of GML standards and future publisher of WMS and Web Feature Service (WFS); in Germany, the Ründer Tisch GIS, a WMS and WFS enterprise development integrating data from regional and local government, and military and commercial inputs. The proven maturity of open standards reduces any risk associated with adoption.

Agile
Organisations need to share information throughout an enterprise. Many suffer the problem of ‘islands of automation’: proprietary or custom systems separated by incompatibilities. This results in duplication of effort, manual processes and interface engineering costs, causing undue expense and delays. To realise the value and benefits of data, many organisations are moving to Web-based, database-centric architectures enabling more timely and responsive information sharing and exploitation. Another factor is cost. Architectures based on ‘islands of automation’ must maintain expensive proprietary interfaces. By comparison, architectures based on open systems deliver the benefits of competitive procurement. The existence of a rich set of consistent open interfaces and schemas provides ‘plug and play’ integration between diverse components, enabling new components to become integrated and operational within greatly reduced timeframes. Open standards enable organisations to be more agile. Organisations can respond to change, reduce the risk of ‘stranded’ technologies, and deliver new capabilities and benefits in months rather than years.

Excitement
The growth in open standards continues throughout the world and many new and exciting capabilities are in the pipeline. The adoption of open standards is an enabler for innovation, allowing organisations and individuals to realise the potential of existing and emergent technologies. Location based services can be easily integrated with other geospatial capabilities through standard interfaces. The fusion of multiple sources of geospatially referenced data such as images, reports and video can be accomplished through use of WMS and other standards. In addition, new standards and encoding for the OGC Web Terrain Service, Sensor Web Enablement, semantic translation and other capabilities are maturing and moving forward in the consensus process. As a founding member of the OGC and strong advocate of open standards solutions, Intergraph finds it exciting to be engaged in many challenging projects using its own standards-based technology, especially when rapid adoption of standards is playing such an important role within the industry. We will continue to use open standards in technology development and encourage adoption within the industry of architecture based on standards.