New OGC Engineering Reports document outcomes of the Open Routing API Pilot, including new capabilities to easily share routes and prototype APIs able to use routing data from any source - based on the next generation of OGC APIs.

12 February 2020: The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has announced publication of the Engineering Reports documenting the work of the Open Routing API Pilot, including implementations developed and a prototype Routing API and Route Exchange Model.

The Open Routing API Pilot was conducted under OGC's Innovation Program, a collaborative, agile, and hands-on prototyping and engineering environment where sponsors and OGC members come together to address location interoperability challenges while validating international open standards.

Road network data, route calculation engines, and routing algorithms are available from many providers and sources. While diversity in the marketplace is generally beneficial to consumers of route information, integration, overlay, or comparison of routes from different routing services can be a complex process. Consumers are offered route assistance derived from different road and network characteristics, based on different information models and served in different formats. Further, the routing services themselves offer non-standard interfaces for requesting and accessing routes.

The Open Routing API Pilot addressed these interoperability issues and developed methods for routing services to incorporate diverse data, routing engines, and routing algorithms in a standardized way, even while operating in denied, degraded, intermittent, or low bandwidth (DDIL) environments.

The pilot generated a JSON-based Route Exchange Model to easily share routes online or offline, and defined APIs for interacting with route services in a standard manner – based on the emerging next generation of OGC APIs and OpenAPI.

The findings of the pilot have been collated into two reports: the OGC Routing Pilot Engineering Report and the WPS Routing API Engineering Report. In addition to the reports, video demonstrations are available on an OGC Routing Pilot API YouTube Playlist.

The OGC Routing Pilot Engineering Report, the WPS Routing API Engineering Report, and all other OGC Engineering Reports are available on the OGC Engineering Reports webpage.

Additional information on the next generation OGC API suite of standards is available at ogcapi.org. Additionally, watch this short video on YouTube about how OGC’s Innovation Program can benefit your organization.

About OGC

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international consortium of more than 530 businesses, government agencies, research organizations, and universities driven to make geospatial (location) information and services FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.

OGC’s member-driven consensus process creates royalty free, publicly available geospatial standards. Existing at the cutting edge, OGC actively analyzes and anticipates emerging tech trends, and runs an agile, collaborative Research and Development (R&D) lab that builds and tests innovative prototype solutions to members' use cases.

OGC members together form a global forum of experts and communities that use location to connect people with technology and improve decision-making at all levels. OGC is committed to creating a sustainable future for us, our children, and future generations.

Visit ogc.org for more info on our work.