30May 2013 – The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public input on thedraft charter of a proposed Standards Working Group (SWG) that will develop acandidate POI (Point of Interest) encoding standard for possible adoption bythe OGC membership as an OGC Standard.
Thedraft charter is available athttps://portal.ogc.org/files/54043.Comments are due by 30 June 2013. Submit comments by sending an email to charter-requests at opengeospatial.org.
TheNational Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and Ordnance Survey are theconvenors of the new SWG.
Apoint of interest (POI) is aspecific point location that someone may find useful or interesting. A POI istypically specified by a latitude and longitude and a name, but may includeother information about the named location. A simple POI encoding standard willmake POI databases more useful by making them more easily usable by moreapplications as well as facilitating sharing of PoI data between organizationsand applications.
Considering how ubiquitous the needfor POI information is, it is surprising that international standardizationefforts have been few. In many ways, one could consider POIs a most fundamentalrequirement of any spatial data infrastructure. PoIs are also important in thecommercial sector in personal navigation and social networks. For example,social networks from Google, Facebook and others have made location such anintegral part of their data model that almost every activity a user engages incan be tagged with location, weaving places of interest seamlessly into the fabricof their social platform.
This standards effort grows out ofsemantic interoperability experiments to merge place name databases fromdifferent organizations in the OGC Testbeds OWS-8 and OWS-9, and also work thatwas done by the W3C POIWG, and OGC's OpenPOI database project. The OGC's OpenPOIdatabase, now in beta, contains POIs formillions of businesses and civic places across the globe. It provides areference implementation for an early version of the proposed Point of Interest(POI) encoding standard.
About the OGC:
The OGC is an internationalconsortium of more than 480 companies, government agencies, researchorganizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to developpublicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperablesolutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-basedservices, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers tomake geospatial information and services accessible and useful with anyapplication that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.
“