July 28, 2015 -- Members of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) request comments on the draft charter for a proposed OGC Standards Working Group (SWG). The OGC Temporal Well Known Text (WKT) for Calendars Standards Working Group is being formed to adapt existing standards to provide the capability to represent and encode temporal metadata within data sets and protocols that use customised calendars.

OGC Members proposing the OGC Temporal WKT for Calendars Standards Working Group have identified a number of communities who use time representations based on calendars which are not the Gregorian calendar. In order to provide interoperable representations of this metadata, extensions to the current metadata standardisation provision in ISO 19162 (Well Known Text), and potentially in other associated standards, are required. This work will involve adaptations and extensions to existing OGC standards and to ISO standards developed in conjunction with the OGC.

A uniform standard for representing temporal metadata within data sets and protocols has particular business value for the Climate Science community, who make extensive use of such temporal representations. This standards work will also benefit the wide range of communities who are looking to make use of climate data to interact with their own data sets to facilitate further applications. The planned standardization effort will also support uniform communication about time in a very wide range of applications unrelated to climate.

The draft charter is available for review at portal.opengeospatial.org/files/64317. Comments should be sent via email to Email Contact and are due by 27 August, 2015.

The OGC is an international geospatial standards consortium of more than 510 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. Visit the OGC website at www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

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