OGC Joins World Standards Day, "Tackling climate change through standards"

World Standards Day ( http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1250 ) is celebrated by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the International Telecommunication Union (ITC) and other organizations each year on 14 October to honor the efforts of thousands of experts worldwide who collaborate to develop voluntary International Standards that facilitate trade, spread knowledge and disseminate technological advances.

In accordance with this year's theme for World Standards Day, "Tackling climate change through standards," the OGC, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) will conduct a Climate Challenge Integration Plugfest (CCIP) at the FOSS4G (Free, Open Source Software for Geomatics) Conference in Sydney, Australia, 20-23 October, 2009. The CCIP is a prime opportunity for vendors, users, and other interested parties to mutually refine services, interfaces and protocols in the context of a hands-on engineering experience expected to shape the future of geospatial and imagery-related Web Services software development and Web publication of scientific geospatial data. Participation is encouraged by commercial entities as well as free and open source projects. See details at http://external.opengis.org/twiki_public/bin/view/ClimateChallenge2009/WebHome.

The OGC supports the climate change community in efforts such as: -- The OGC leads architecture development and interoperability demonstrations for the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) ( http://earthobservations.org/about_geo.shtml ).

-- Geoscientists involved in ocean observation, meteorology and hydrology are embracing OGC standards. See these OGC Domain Working Groups at http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/wg.

-- The OGC's Geography Markup Language Encoding Standard (GML) is part of the IEC's Common Information Model (CIM) smart grid standard and OGC participates in the smart grid standards effort led by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The smart grid promotes energy efficiency and renewable energy.

-- The OGC's recent AEC/Owner/Operator (AECOO) Testbed, run in collaboration with the buildingSmart alliance, explored, among other things, ways that energy analysis of buildings could be served by interoperability standards for Building Information Models (BIM).

The OGC works with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), OASIS, International Organization for Standards (ISO), IEEE Technical Committee 9 (Sensors), Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), Web3D and other standards organizations to ensure a unified standards framework for geospatial technologies. This framework is a critical asset for those who are working to understand and mitigate climate change and its impacts.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 385 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. The OGC's OpenGIS® standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. These standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org.