Open Geospatial Consortium Needs Public Comment

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) seeks public comment on the candidate OGC Open GeoSMS Standard - Core.

The candidate OGC Open GeoSMS Standard allows applications to location enable Short Message Service (SMS). SMS is the text communication service component of phone, web and mobile communication systems. SMS uses standardized communications protocols that allow the exchange of short text messages between fixed line or mobile phone devices. Open GeoSMS enables developers to use extended Short Message Service (SMS) to facilitate communication of location content between different LBS (Location-Based Service) devices or applications. The encoding is extremely light weight and the standards document is quite short.

The Taiwan Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) contributed this candidate standard to the OGC. Open GeoSMS is already in use in a number of deployed commercial applications in Taiwan as well as in a number of disaster response applications such as those provided by Sahana.

The candidate OGC Open GeoSMS Standard can be found here. The period for issuing comments expires on 24 April 2011.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 410 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.