ASTM International and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) to Jointly Develop Standards and More through MOU

1 April 2016. ASTM International and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) will collaborate on developing and disseminating standards, best practices, and other tools that support the growing geospatial industry.

The organizations plan to work together in areas such as data acquisition and dissemination, location-based services, and unmanned (autonomous) navigation.

Daniel Smith, vice president, technical committee operations at ASTM and Mark Reichardt, President and CEO, OGC, signed the MOU.

"For more than 20 years, we have been bringing people together to support interoperability among IT systems that leverage location-based information," said Reichardt. "Partnering with ASTM on standards development is a logical next step in meeting our mission, the interests of our 500+ member organizations, and needs of the global community that our organizations collectively represent."

As part of their work, the two organizations plan to assess the current state of adopted and de facto standards for Point Cloud data (sets of data points that help determine geographical locations). Then, the organizations could identify the scope of future standards to support interoperability of this data for sharing and analysis. In some cases, this could involve collaborative publication of standards.

"We are pleased that OGC, whose members include industry, government, and academia will be collaborating with ASTM members in this fast-changing field," said Smith. "This partnership aligns perfectly with the growing number of activities in ASTM committees E57 on 3D Imaging Systems and F42 on Additive Manufacturing Technologies."

The group plans to organize joint activities such as working groups, regional forums, workshops, pilot initiatives, and more.

About ASTM International
Over 12,000 ASTM standards operate globally. Defined and set by us, they improve the lives of millions every day. Combined with our innovative business services, they enhance performance and help everyone have confidence in the things they buy and use – from the toy in a child’s hand to the aircraft overhead. Working across borders, disciplines, and industries we harness the expertise of over 30,000 members to create consensus and improve performance in manufacturing and materials, products and processes, systems and services. Understanding commercial needs and consumer priorities, we touch every part of everyday life: helping our world work better. http://www.astm.org

About OGC
The OGC is an international consortium of more than 515 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. http://www.opengeospatial.org