22 July, 2015. The OpenGeospatial Consortium (OGC®)in collaboration with buildingSMARTInternational (bSI) invites sponsorship in a pilot project to helpcities around the world benefit from modern standards for geospatialtechnologies. The Pilot, based in Europe, will demonstrate and enhance theability of cities to use diverse, interoperating spatial technologies todeliver improved quality of life, civic initiatives and resilience.
Human, natural, and physical systems interact in space and time, and thedigital systems in cities will become increasingly diverse and numerous, withmany owners. Cities thus need an open, vendor-neutral standards platform forcommunicating spatial and temporal data. Many of the longstanding technicalboundaries separating indoor, outdoor, underground and atmospheric information havebeen overcome. The FutureCities Pilot will show how cities can begin to reapthe benefits.
OGC and other standards organizations have made recent progress in fieldssuch as city modelling, indoor navigation, citizen science and the Internet ofThings. bSI is extending its BIM Standards to encompass infrastructure andother elements of the built environment. bSI and OGC collaborate in areas suchas urban and infrastructure modelling and indoor/outdoor navigation.
The FutureCities Pilot will bring together visionary sponsors to helpdefine activities that meet cities' spatial information requirements. Allrequirements, lessons learned and results will be shared among participants andmade available to the public and cities everywhere. Hosting cities will benefitfrom OGC/bSI-led workshops for scoping and requirements-collecting,introductions to vendors and developers with commitment to open systems, publicdemonstration and leave-behind solutions. Sponsoring organisations will benefitfrom the opportunity to directly work with municipal personnel and understandtheir cities' requirements first hand. Solutions to current urban challengesmay act as forerunners for solutions in rural environments. In addition,results will guide future standards development.
OrdnanceSurvey, a Strategic Member of the OGC, has long used open standards andcontributed to their development. As one of the sponsors of this pilot,Ordnance Survey will bring valuable experience and expertise.
The OGC and bSI are reaching out to city departments, companies,professional organizations, foundations and research groups to work with theOrdnance Survey as co-sponsors in this shared-cost, results-orientedcollaborative effort. The OGC Interoperability Program has conducted more than 85collaborative testbeds, pilot projects, interoperability experiments andplugfests.
Organizations interested in sponsoring or hosting the pilot are invitedto contact OGC before September 15 to provide input in the planning phase. Contact Bart de Lathouwer, the OGC Initiative Director for the pilot byemailing bdelathouwer[at] opengeospatial.org.
OGC® is a geospatialstandards consortium of more than 510 companies, government agencies, researchorganisations, and universities participating in a consensus process to developopen standards that support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable”the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. See http://www.opengeospatial.org/.
bSI is the worldwide authority driving transformation of the built asseteconomy through creation and adoption of open, international standards. bSI has17 national Chapters across the globe representing all sectors of theconstruction industry. See http://www.buildingsmart.org/.
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