OGC seeks sponsors for FutureCities Pilot

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) in collaboration with buildingSMART International (bSI) invites sponsorship in a pilot project to help cities around the world benefit from modern standards for geospatial technologies. The Pilot, based in Europe, will demonstrate and enhance the ability of cities to use diverse, interoperating spatial technologies to deliver improved quality of life, civic initiatives and resilience.

Human, natural, and physical systems interact in space and time, and the digital systems in cities will become increasingly diverse and numerous, with many owners. Cities thus need an open, vendor-neutral standards platform for communicating spatial and temporal data. Many of the longstanding technical boundaries separating indoor, outdoor, underground and atmospheric information have been overcome. The FutureCities Pilot will show how cities can begin to reap the benefits.

OGC and other standards organizations have made recent progress in fields such as city modelling, indoor navigation, citizen science and the Internet of Things. bSI is extending its BIM Standards to encompass infrastructure and other elements of the built environment. bSI and OGC collaborate in areas such as urban and infrastructure modelling and indoor/outdoor navigation.

The FutureCities Pilot will bring together visionary sponsors to help define activities that meet cities' spatial information requirements. All requirements, lessons learned and results will be shared among participants and made available to the public and cities everywhere. Hosting cities will benefit from OGC/bSI-led workshops for scoping and requirements-collecting, introductions to vendors and developers with commitment to open systems, public demonstration and leave-behind solutions. Sponsoring organisations will benefit from the opportunity to directly work with municipal personnel and understand their cities' requirements first hand. Solutions to current urban challenges may act as forerunners for solutions in rural environments. In addition, results will guide future standards development.

Ordnance Survey, a Strategic Member of the OGC, has long used open standards and contributed to their development. As one of the sponsors of this pilot, Ordnance Survey will bring valuable experience and expertise.

The OGC and bSI are reaching out to city departments, companies, professional organizations, foundations and research groups to work with the Ordnance Survey as co-sponsors in this shared-cost, results-oriented collaborative effort. The OGC Interoperability Program has conducted more than 85 collaborative testbeds, pilot projects, interoperability experiments and plugfests.

Organizations interested in sponsoring or hosting the pilot are invited to contact OGC before September 15 to provide input in the planning phase.  Contact Bart de Lathouwer, the OGC Initiative Director for the pilot by emailing bdelathouwer [at] opengeospatial.org.

OGC® is a geospatial standards consortium of more than 510 companies, government agencies, research organisations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop open standards that support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. See http://www.opengeospatial.org/.

bSI is the worldwide authority driving transformation of the built asset economy through creation and adoption of open, international standards. bSI has 17 national Chapters across the globe representing all sectors of the construction industry. See http://www.buildingsmart.org/.