Frequently, geospatial content providers must collaborate with outside entities to collect new data and/or update their existing data holdings. This may be the case, for example, when municipal, state/provincial and/or federal agencies synchronize their data with closest-to-source providers. Another case is when content providers are crowdsourcing (see   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing ) elements of their data production or supporting volunteer geographic information (VGI).

This candidate OGC Best Practice describes how to use the OGC's open interface and encoding standards to implement services that mediate interaction between geospatial data providers, the content repositories, and the external entities acting as data collectors. Such services support data entry with validation, notification of changes to interested parties and replication of the data content submitted to multiple repositories.

This document defines an OGC Best Practice on a particular technology or approach related to OGC standards. This document is not an OGC standard and may not be referred to as an OGC standard. It is subject to change without notice.

However, this document is an official position of the OGC membership on this particular technology topic. The following organizations submitted this Best Practice to the OGC: The Carbon Project, OpenGeo.org and  CubeWerx Inc.

The candidate OGC GeoSynchronization Best Practices document is available for public review and comment at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/84.  Submit comments on the candidate Best Practices document to requests@lists.opengeospatial.org. The comment period ends January 7, 2012.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 430 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. Visit the OGC website at   http://www.opengeospatial.org.