Bear with us ... What does Open Geospatial Data have to do with bears?
Being able to share and use geospatial data is essential the operation of society, the economy and understanding how we can manage our natural resources in a sustainable way. Geospatial standards enable us to collect, share and use location based data efficiently to deliver smart applications at local, national and global scale in a huge range of areas across hundreds of thousands of organisations world-wide. Geospatial standards are necessarily complex because digital geographic data and processing are complex. As new technologies develop such as the Internet of Things, the standards need to evolve. The Open Geospatial Consortium works to develop standards to make the sharing of data possible is domains as diverse as agriculture, environment, transport and infrastructure, disaster management, regional development, gaming and much more.
The OGC is an international consortium of more than 515 companies, government agencies, research organisations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC 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 www.opengeospatial.org
The Open Geospatial Consortium's (OGC) 105th Technical & Planning Committee (TC/PC) Meeting was hosted by Manaaki Whenua - Landcare Research in Palmerston North, New Zealand from December 4th – 8th 2017. This was the first time the meeting has been held in New Zealand and provided a great opportunity to bring international and local expertise to the table to participate in the variety of OGC Domain and Standards Working Groups.
Two open summits created the platform for engagement between local and international experts on topics of particular importance in New Zealand: Environment and Agriculture.