At GITA 2006 yesterday I witnessed a major milestone for the geospatial world thanks to the Open
Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Ten vendors in the geospatial arena viewed and updated shared maps. In alphabetical order, ASA, Autodesk, Bentley, eSpatial, ESRI, Intergraph, Ionic, Oracle, Safe Software, and Telus participated in a demonstration of a disaster management scenario that starred the City of Tampa.
Replete with news casts and simulated oil spills and noxious gas clouds, the demonstration showed how geospatial data could be shared live among geospatial products from most of the major vendors using open web services standards WMS/WFS/GML defined by the OGC. Not only was the demonstration extremely well presented, but the fact that OGC was able to achieve the cooperation of so many vendors is a remarkable accomplishment. Congratulations are due to the OGC and its members in general, and to Greg Buehler in paricular, for enabiling this to happen. It clearly showed the potential benefits of geospatial interoperability.
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