June 4, 2014”The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) membership has formed the Mobile Location Services Domain Working Group (DWG). The new group will replace both the existing Mass Market and OpenLS working groups. In an effort to better reflect the current technology market this new DWG will be focused on interoperability in a number of key areas including mobile, Internet of Things (IoT), SensorWeb, Points of Interest, Augmented Reality, geofencing and related location services.
The kick-off meeting of the new Mobile Location Services DWG will be at the June 2014 Technical Committee meeting in Geneva, Switzerland.
The Mobile Location Services DWG provides a forum for both OGC members and interested non-members to review the requirements of the growing mobile and location services industry and make recommendations for OGC’s development and adoption of open standards to improve interoperability. What has changed in the market is the explosion in applications for mobile devices, the emergence of cloud computing, and the availability of new and emerging OGC interface and encoding standards and best practices that greatly expand the data and services options available to developers.
In recent OGC Testbeds, the Open Mobility and Cross Community Interoperability technology threads produced Engineering Reports that address location for mobile apps, security, semantics and information architecture. Further detail and implementation guidance can be found in these comprehensive reports. Some of the Public Engineering Reports that are available now are:
· OGC Testbed-10 Rules for JSON and GeoJSON Adoption: Focus on OWS-Context
Watch the OGC Public Engineering Reports page for other Testbed-10 Engineering Reports that are now in the final stages of editing. (Click on “Date” in the table’s heading row to see the most recent reports.) Topics include, for example:
· Performance of OGC Services in the Cloud
· OpenMobility and GeoPackage
· OGC Web Service integration
· Cross-Community Interoperability
· OWS Context in requests based on the US National Information Exchange Model (NIEM)
The OGC Mobile Location Services DWG also supports and encourages other OGC working groups to make progress on various key services and encodings, and seeks their advice on topics of mutual interest. Some of the OGC standards that are particularly relevant to Mobile Location Services are:
- OGC GeoPackage Encoding Standard
- OGC Open GeoSMS
- GeoRSS (GML RSS Profile)
- OGC KML
- OGC Web Services Context Document (OWS Context)
Pending standards and OGC working groups that are particularly relevant to Mobile Location Services include:
- OGC ARML 2.0 SWG (Augmented Reality Markup Language)
- OGC IndoorGML SWG
- OGC Points of Interest (PoI) SWG
- OGC Sensor Web for IoT SWG “ SensorThings
Developers working in areas of mobile and location services application development are encouraged to investigate these OGC standards and follow and participate in the activities of the OGC Domain Working Groups and Standards Working Groups whose work impacts their development objectives.
The OGC Mobile Location Services DWG will support and help focus the OGC’s ongoing collaboration with OGC Alliance partners such as:
- Open Mobile Alliance (OMA)
- In-Location Alliance
- World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
- Location Based Marketing Association (LBMA)
- Small Cell Forum
At the recent Mobile World Congress event, the OGC’s GeoPackage and IndoorGML workshops and an Augmented Reality interoperability demo were well attended. These workshops were organized with the participation of members of the Mobile Location Services DWG.
The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 475 companies, government agencies, research organizations, 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. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/.
