The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announced the formation of a new OGC® Technical Committee Standards Working Group (SWG) to advance the candidate OGC GeoPackage (GPKG) Standard. The OGC members convening this group invite the public to comment on the GeoPackage SWG charter (https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/50347) and will consider comments received before 14 November 2012.

Mobile device users who require geospatial application services and associated data and who operate in disconnected or limited network connectivity environments frequently do not have open, available geospatial data to support their applications. Applications include mobile workforce data capture and updates, volunteered geographic information, and real time annotations of map data in an emergency event.

OGC members are proposing an open, non-proprietary, platform-independent GeoPackage container for distribution and direct use of all kinds of geospatial data. The GeoPackage container and related API will increase the cross-platform interoperability of geospatial applications and web services in the mobile world.  Standard APIs for access and management of GeoPackage data will provide consistent query and update results across such applications and services. 

Future enhancements to the GeoPackage standard, a future GeoPackage Web Service standard, and modifications to existing OGC Web Service (OWS) standards to use GeoPackages as exchange formats will allow OWS to support provisioning of GeoPackages throughout an enterprise or information community.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 465 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 useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.