OGC and INSPIRE Interoperability

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC, USA) and EuroGeographics, France, have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to promote interoperability through open standards to benefit the European geospatial community. The two organisations both seek to promote compatible, standards-based Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) and the OGC is to help EuroGeographics support a broad range of European stakeholders responding to Europe's INSPIRE Directive.  

The organisations will work cooperatively on outreach and communications to raise the awareness, acceptance, and implementation of open standards and related educational programs and best practices.

This will include activities such as participation in international webinars; publishing papers on implementations; documenting Return on Investment; and examination and discussion of legal and policy issues associated with the use of spatial information and associated technologies. The two organisations will also work to identify, plan and convene joint workshops, conference sessions and symposia.

EuroGeographics and the OGC also will seek funding and in-kind resources to advance joint OGC testbeds, pilot projects, and interoperability experiments, with a focus on advancing the European Location Framework.

"As an international standards organisation, OGC recognises the importance of regional requirements for interoperability," said Mark Reichardt, President and CEO of the OGC. "This partnership will help OGC better understand and address the interoperability challenges facing leading mapping, land registry and cadastre organisations across Europe as they work to provide timely, accurate and useful geospatial information in support of a range of local to international challenges."

"With technology driving geographical information into the mainstream, the development of SDIs to underpin services is crucial and this partnership will play an important role in maximising the use and benefits of the authoritative, definitive and high quality data provided by our members," commented EuroGeographics' Secretary General and executive director, Dave Lovell. "It builds upon a well established and productive relationship between the two organisations, most recently seen in an interoperability experiment built on the ESDIN project's best practice, which demonstrated that Shibboleth, which is open source software based on open standards, can be used to set up secure geospatial services that comply with the INSPIRE Directive and OGC standards."