MapInfo is a global company supplying location intelligence solutions. For more than twenty years we have been pioneering the integration of software, data and services to provide greater value from location-based information for private and public-sector organisations. Businesses change when they begin to see the location components of their data as a hidden asset that can be broadly applied. Working with better intelligence means working more efficiently, providing better service and becoming more competitive. Employees who learn to ‘think spatially’ with geospatial tools at their fingertips continue to find new ways to apply these tools and make better use of custom data.
But not all data is in one place. Within even a relatively small enterprise it is likely that different kinds of corporate data have been created and stored using different systems. Also, many solutions require additional data that may have to be obtained from data vendors, government data suppliers or business partners. More crucially, the advent of the internet and the web have made users less patient with time-consuming bulk-data acquisition and conversion. Consequently, we at MapInfo have been working for a decade with users and our competitors within the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to address the compelling need for direct communication between software products and online services, regardless of vendor, internal data format, operating system or system architecture. The OGC membership has developed standards, OpenGIS Specifications, that when implemented in products make it easy for users to extract the full geospatial value of corporate data stored, for example, in Oracle, DB2 or SAP systems. We have made it easy to integrate spatial capabilities with web services that employ technologies like XML and Java.
All of this of course expands the market, which benefits everyone. Open geospatial standards enable new capabilities that no single vendor could invent and market. The ‘aggregation’ of technology providers and major users in the OGC as it enacts an open and formal process of consensus reaching makes it the natural forum for initiatives. So far these include the Sensor Web Enablement (SWE), Geospatial Digital Rights Management (GeoDRM), and harmonisation of standards crucial to industries involved in planning, construction, sale and management of buildings and physical infrastructure. The richness of this activity and the increasing acceptance of the OGC open framework inspire vendors to innovate, specialise and invest in niche markets.
The world is catching on to the importance of the ‘where’ component in information systems. Geospatial data-streams are multiplying in number and in volume as new sensor technologies and tagging technologies (from RFID to GeoRSS) gain traction within diverse markets, and as organisations begin to mine the geospatial value of ‘ordinary’ data such as that produced by credit-card transactions. Data is increasingly made available and useful through online services. OGC standards are the vital factor enabling vendors and integrators to bring distributed data and services together to provide location intelligence solutions. |
