Standards: Meeting Expectations

Carmenta has been delivering mission-critical Geospatial Information Technology (GIT) and map-based operational systems for more than a decade. We have focused primarily on the aviation and defence markets, but are increasingly working in others such as public safety and logistics. Our products in the SpatialAce family are building blocks for GIT solutions, competing with products such as ESRI's ArcGIS Engine and MapInfo MapX technology.

Our market experience since the early 1990s confirms the strong trend towards component-based development in the IT industry. Instead of using wholly proprietary or custom solutions even large companies such as EADS and BAE Systems increasingly ask for standards-based 'Commercial Off The Shelf' (COTS) components to embed in their solutions. By using 'plug and play' components, time and money are saved in both development and future upgrade and integration costs. This is what we offer.

We develop our own technology with extensive in-house R&D, and it is designed around a very open approach. We adapt every relevant part of the technology to open standards provided by OGC and other standards organisations. There is really no better way than via standards conformance to offer safe solutions in large, distributed systems carrying some technology necessarily provided by other vendors.

Our open approach includes geodata. SpatialAce does not have its own, proprietary format. Instead, it natively reads a number of available formats, including the standard Geography Markup Language (GML) produced by servers that comply with the OpenGIS Web Feature Service Specification. In this way we have focused on optimising analysis and presentation with 'on-the-fly' performance. Another product, the SpatialAce Web Map Server, makes it simple to build interactive 2D and 3D web-based map solutions for any application. The product implements the OGC WMS (OpenGIS Web Map Services) specification.

One can think of standards as a way to meet expectations both at technical and human level, and it is hard to imagine that open standards do not improve the world. At the technical level, OGC's international, consensus-derived standards enable developers to write servers and clients that 'expect' certain parameter names and data types in digital queries and responses coming across a computer bus or a network. At the human level, Carmenta is ISO 9001:2000 certified and ISO 14001 certified because these standards give us a way to readily inform others that we meet certain expectations regarding quality and environmental management.

No organisation is prevented from using such standards and the information necessary to implement them is free. As more and more organisations implement and use standards the size of the world's communicating and co-operating community grows. People within the geospatial industry know what challenges we face in this century: energy, water, climate change, urban development, and protecting the peace, to name a few. Standards help us in our co-operative efforts to meet these challenges.