18 February 2014 – The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) invites Mobile World Congress attendees to attend workshops on the new OGC GeoPackage Service Interface Standard, the candidate OGC IndoorGML Encoding Standard, and the candidate OGC Augmented Reality Markup Language (ARML2) Encoding Standard. Attendees at this free event will also see a demonstration of ARML2 being used to enable interoperability among leading Augmented Reality platform providers Layar, Metaio and Wikitude.  The demo and workshops will be held in the afternoon after the morning presentations on "OGC Location Standards for a Mobile World" by representatives from OGC, OMA (Open Mobile Alliance), W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and the Small Cell Forum. More information and to register, visit http://www.myogc.org/go/mobile2014

 

The day's events will be held from 0900 to 1500 on 25 February 2014 in Barcelona, Spain at the Institut Cartogràfic I Geològic de Catalunya (ICGC), formerly the Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya (ICC)(see map),during the Mobile World Congress. The Mobile World Congress, running 24-27 February 2014 in Barcelona, is the world's largest exhibition, conference and networking event for mobile operators, cell phone and device manufacturers, and providers of mobile software.

 

The recently approved OGC GeoPackage Encoding Standard enables easier exchange and sharing of geospatial (or location) information across different devices, applications and web services throughout the mobile world. A modern, service-oriented alternative to conventional spatial data formats, GeoPackage's SQLite-based format efficiently stores and transfers geographic vector features and image tiles. GeoPackage was developed for mobile application developers whose applications need to provide users with geospatial application services and associated data in disconnected or limited network connectivity environments, or whose applications depend on geospatial data and processing services from diverse sources.

 

Beginning tomorrow, the candidate OGC IndoorGML Encoding Standard will be in its final 30-day public comment period before its adoption vote by members of the OGC. It has been developed to provide a common schema framework for interoperability between indoor navigation applications. These cover a wide spectrum of application areas such as indoor location services, indoor web map services, indoor emergency control, guiding services for visually handicapped persons in indoor space, and indoor robotics.

 

In addition to these presentations about location standards that maximize the value of mobile devices' location awareness, the OGC will host the world’s first Augmented Reality (AR) Browser Interoperability Demonstration. Layar, Metaio and Wikitude, the largest AR platform providers, have cooperated to make it easy for AR content to be shared across their technology platforms. This cooperation has resulted in the development of three unreleased but fully functioning browsers from the three companies.  The common AR interchange format that enables this AR interoperability is based on the candidate OGC ARML 2.0 Encoding Standard that Martin Lechner of Wikitude introduced into the OGC. ARML is expected to come to an adoption vote within OGC in the next couple of months.

 

Attendees will have an opportunity to meet developers familiar with these three standards and discuss the opportunities that arise from standards-based integration on mobile devices of spatial data and services.

 

George Percivall, Chief Engineer, OGC, said, "This event marks an important milestone in progress of open standards for spatial data and location services becoming easy to implement on mobile devices for a very wide variety of applications. Smart Cities require a convergence of spatially enabled information to improve the efficiency, equity and quality of urban living. The data will come from many sources and be used for many purposes. Come to ICC next Tuesday and talk to OGC about GeoPackage, IndoorGML, ARML and our plans for a Smart Cities Testbed."

 

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international consortium of more than 470 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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