4 November 2010. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announces the formation of a GeoSynchronization Service Standards Working Group (SWG). (https://portal.ogc.org/files/?artifact_id=39476).
Frequently, geospatial content providers must collaborate with outside entities to collect new data and/or update their existing data holdings. This may be the case, for example, when municipal, state/provincial and/or federal agencies synchronize their data with closest-to-source providers. Another case is when content providers are crowd-sourcing (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing) their data production or supporting volunteer geographic information (VGI).
There is a need for an open interface to services that mediate interaction between geospatial data providers, the content repositories, and the external entities acting as data collectors. The service must support data entry with validation and notification of changes to interested parties, and also must allow replication of the data content submitted to multiple repositories.
The OGC Candidate GeoSynchronization Service Standard describes an open standard interface to a software service that allows data collectors to propose changes to be made to a data provider's geospatial features (such as data about property lines, city population, vehicle location, etc.). A change proposal can be made to create new data or to modify/delete existing data. Proposed changes are reviewed (either manually or automatically) and are either accepted or rejected. Accepted changes are applied to the appropriate repositories. The service also maintains a log of all changes applied to each feature.
Charter Members of the new standards activity are CubeWerx, The Carbon Project, GeoConnections – Natural Resources Canada, U.S. Army Geospatial Center (AGC), U.S. Geological Survey, Ministère des resources naturelles et de la faune du Québec (MRNF), and the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).
The OGC is an international consortium of more than 400 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. 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 http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.
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