April 8, 2010, Wayland, Massachusetts. The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC(R)) announces the formation of an Aviation Domain Working Group (DWG) (www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/aviationdwg ). The Aviation DWG will support the evaluation, advancement, operational use and validation of OGC standards within the Aviation domain. The Aviation DWG will contribute towards increasing global adoption of OGC standards and complementary standards and coordinate the technical input, when required, to support profiling or extending those standards to meet the requirements of the Aviation community.
The Aviation DWG will complement ongoing and planned aviation-related initiatives and organizations (such as the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) Aviation Integrated Project Team (IPT)), seeking synergies in technical guidance and problem definition. The Aviation DWG will also liaise, as needed, with various OGC working groups such as the Meteorology and Oceanography, Security, and Geography Markup Language (GML) Working Groups.
A key market driver for forming the Aviation DWG is that EUROCONTROL and the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have System Wide Information Management (SWIM) initiatives under development that will result in a unified net-centric information environment. This information environment will make it possible for pilots, air traffic controllers and other aviation stakeholders to get information from multiple Web services and from linked Web services that communicate with each other. Aircraft location and route information, weather information, and most other kinds of aviation-related information include geospatial data, so these aviation authorities have included OGC's geospatial interface and encoding standards in their shared standards platform.
The OGC is an international consortium of more than 390 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.
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