Two Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) member universities are conducting a public survey about the business benefits of using OGC’s OpenGIS standards. The survey asks some fairly detailed questions such as which standards you’re using, how often you use the standards, and the overall benefits and importance of the standards to your business.

I’ve been following the work of the OGC very closely as a reporter for more than ten years now, and I was frankly surprised by the long number of standards that the organization has developed and validated. Here’s a list just to give you that same sense of awareness that I gained: Catalogue Services, Application profiles of Catalogue: 19115, Application profiles of Catalogue: ebRIM, Coordination Transformation, Filter Encoding, Geographic Objects, Geography Markup Language (GML), Geospatial eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (GeoXACML), GML in JPEG 2000, Grid Coverage Service, KML, Location Services (OpenLS), Observations and Measurements (O&M), Sensor Model Language (SensorML), Sensor Observation Service (SOS), Sensor Planning, Simple Features, Simple Features CORBA, Simple Features OLE/COM, Simple Features SQL, Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD), Symbology Encoding, Transducer Markup Language (TML), Web Coverage Service (WCS), Web Feature Service (WFS), Web Map Context (WMC), Web Map Service, Web Processing Service (WPS), Web Service Common.

Many of you are likely using OGC standards as a primary file format for your own enterprise operations. I’ve been a long fan of the work of the Open Geospatial Consortium, and often affectionately refer to it as the “brain trust” of the geospatial industry. I’ve been fortunate to cover several meetings of the minds at OGC functions over the years, and I always come away enlightened and appreciative of the behind the scenes workings that are extending the reach of geospatial technology and making the lives of practitioners so much easier.

One of the most impressive and exciting areas of their work deals with sensors. I’ve been captivated by the concept of the sensor web since I first heard it articulated by Vincent Tao, who is now with Microsoft. The OGC has done some pioneering work to bring the idea of the sensor web to reality. If you’re not familiar, be sure to read up on this on the OGC website here.

Be sure to take the survey and let your own thoughts be known. As a side benefit, there will be three winners that will have their choice of: (1) Seagate Xtreme Black 1.5TB 3.5″ Hard Drive – 7200, USB 2.0, FireWire-400, eSATA; (2) Apple iPod Touch 16GB MP3 Player; (3) Able Planet NC1000CH Clear Harmony Noise Canceling Headphones.

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