OGC and World Geospatial Industry Council sign Memorandum of Understanding

17 December 2018: At the InterGEO event in Frankfurt, Germany, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the World Geospatial Industry Council (WGIC) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to collaborate on promoting the power of geospatial and location-based technologies to government, markets, and industries worldwide.

Location has been a powerful tool that has improved decision-making across the public and private sectors, but hasn’t yet been fully leveraged. WGIC has created an industry platform to provide a unified industry voice on evolving policy, and to encourage the power of geospatial technologies and associated information to be more broadly leveraged across the world.

Since 1994, the OGC has led a global geospatial industry forum to advance open standards that enable a wealth of different geospatial technologies, information sources, and analytics to be seamlessly shared and integrated. The collaboration between OGC and the newly formed WGIC is a natural extension of our respective missions, to expand the benefit that location brings to improved government and industry insight and decision-making.

Mark Reichardt, President & CEO of OGC, commented: “There’s an incredible infrastructure of geospatial tools, information and analytics that are ready to be tapped, but that many markets aren’t yet aware of. OGC has worked with industry to advance a framework of open international standards that allows these tools to be rapidly mobilized via a framework of open international standards. The WGIC is creating a common voice among the geospatial industry to engage in policy discussions, and to promote the amazing the value of this work to the broader government and industry communities.”

Sanjay Kumar, Secretary General & CEO of WGIC, commented that “WGIC aims to engage and collaborate with major economic industries worldwide in order to integrate geospatial knowledge within the business processes of those industries. OGC is the leading geospatial standards development organisation and has built a credible process of engagement with major industries. WGIC finds it natural to collaborate and work together with OGC to pursue its common vision of enhancing the value of geospatial knowledge in the world economy and across society.”

As part of the MOU, OGC and WGIC will establish an appropriate joint working group/committee to facilitate discussion on addressing key geospatial technical and policy opportunities and challenges of mutual interest to WGIC and OGC stakeholder environments. This group will initially focus on facilitating discussion regarding the interoperability challenges that exist between the geospatial and Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) markets.