OGC India Plugfest focuses on open data standardization and its use in smart solutions

We get enormous location data from various sources like mobile devices, stationary sensors, airborne imaging systems and modeling applications. The explosion in location data offers great potential. Integration of human, physical and digital systems operating in the built environment can improve governance, business, and quality of life.

However, we often see location data is locked up in ad-hoc and proprietary encoding and interfaces.

Location services can be made accessible to diverse applications. Applications can be made to discover access, evaluate, compare, aggregate and fuse diverse data. Open standards make this possible. It is on these lines that OGC India organized Indian OGC Interoperability Plugfest on June 21, which was a review of the 2015 Plugfest.

Four companies participated in the plugfest – Hexagon Geospatial, Rolta, ESRI India and SkyMapGlobal. The main agenda was the importance of standardization of open data and its importance in smart solutions for smart cities.

During the OGC India Forum Meeting held in NSDI on November 3, 2015, a decision was taken to undertake an ‘OGC Plugfest’ in the area of Smart Cities, a key mission of Government of India.

Scott Simmons, Executive Director, Standards Program at OGC, who participated in the meeting, had outlined the process involved in undertaking a Plugfest, on the lines of Plugfests undertaken in the past by New Zealand Government in May 2012 and theOrdnance Survey UK in Sept 2013.

As per   practice, OGC Interoperability Plugfest, Testbed and Pilot initiatives are always funded by OGC members who  wish to accelerate the pace at which interoperability is developed and implemented through standards in the marketplace. In this instance, a decision was taken at OGC  to  provide  funding from the OGC India Foundation and OGC staff resources to support this Plugfest initiative, hosted at NSDI  under DST  ( OGC Principal member),  with the expectation that decision makers in India would see the benefits of funding similar OGC initiatives in the future to rapidly advance their interoperability requirements, as undertaken globally .