Redlands, Ca, May 15, 2014 -- Esri announces the support of the new Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)  GeoPackage Encoding Standard. This new OGC specification defines GeoPackages for exchange and GeoPackage SQLite Extensions for direct use of vector geospatial features and/or tile matrix sets.

Esri actively participated in the development of this standard and was one of the very early adopters of the specification – supporting it even before it was approved by OGC membership as a final standard.

• Esri delivered draft GeoPackage support in the ArcGIS 10.2.1 for Desktop that shipped at the end of 2013.
• ArcGIS 10.2.2 for Desktop and Server provide support for the 1.0 vector specification recently adopted by OGC as a new standard.
• In summer 2014, ArcGIS 10.3 for Desktop will add platforms and deployment options based on 1.0 vector and tiled raster specification for OGC GeoPackage and ArcGIS Runtime10.2.4 for Android and Java will also support GeoPackage.

"Esri continues to add support for many open and interoperable data sources," says Keith Ryden, Esri software development team member, who led Esri's work on GeoPackage and worked on the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC), standard. "Adding GeoPackage support was a natural progression to our previous support of OGC WMS, WMTS, WFS, WCS, and OGC KML. We are committed to making our users successful, and we had users interested in Esri's early support of GeoPackage, so we ended up supporting even the draft specification prior to its becoming an OGC standard. We will be interested to see how popular the use of GeoPackage becomes."

For more information on Esri support for OGC GeoPackage, visit  esriurl.com/geopackageblog.

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Since 1969, Esri has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS, Esri software is used in more than 350,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. Esri applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world's mapping and spatial analysis. Esri is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit us at  www.esri.com.

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