This week, I had the opportunity to attend OGC@30, the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The early 1990s were the very beginning of my professional career and they were also a time of geospatial innovation. Many of the pioneers from that time, including OGC founder David Schell, were in the room that night. Mr. Schell was rightly given a lifetime achievement award, which will now be known as the David Schell Lifetime Achievement Award. This is right and good – just as OSGEO acknowledges its own pioneers by giving out the Sol Katz Award.
In his acceptance speech, Mr. Schell acknowledged other early pioneers such as Kurt Buehler and Carl Reed, who were also in attendance, as well as others who have passed on since those days. His speech, and the entire evening, was an object lesson in how much of today’s geospatial innovation is rooted in, and enabled by, the forward-thinking work happening at that time.
Take, for example, OGC’s first specification, the Simple Features Specification (SFS). Published in 1997, it standardized the representation of geometric objects – points, lines, polygons, curves, etc. – in geospatial datasets. I have written before that SFS is the quiet workhorse of OGC. Implementations have taken many forms: Geography Markup Language (GML), SDE, all forms of the Esri geodatabase, RDBMS spatial extensions (PostGIS, SQL Server, Oracle Spatial, DB2, etc.), data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, etc.), GeoJSON, GeoPackage, SpatiaLite, Apache Sedona (Spark), all the way through to GeoParquet.
In SFS alone, OGC has shepherded the geospatial discipline through the workstation, desktop, web, and cloud eras and leaves us well-positioned for AI.
I have been critical of some OGC specifications in the past, but I became a convert a long time ago. My previous criticism was rooted in a narrow view precipitated from my own frustrations with working around imperfections in specifications such as WMS and WFS.
Here is some news: specifications developed by humans are imperfect.
Years ago, I was attempting to integrate data from medical devices of various vendors and was astounded by how exponentially harder it was than integrating geographic data. Then I remembered the early, pre-OGC, days of my career when shipping data between various proprietary systems was nearly impossible. That’s what dealing with this medical data felt like.
Later, when trying to integrate data from various CRM and billing systems, I encountered similar issues. In most other verticals, there is no “SFS” that standardizes the representation of basic primitives such as customers or accounts, and this lack of interoperability is seen as an advantage by raising barriers to exit for users and also making it harder to stitch together best-of-breed products. If two vendors haven’t entered into a partnership and agreed to develop integrations between their platforms, then such integrations will be nearly impossible for a user to accomplish themselves.
The fact that ArcGIS Pro can connect to a PostGIS database is not only the direct result of OGC specifications such as SFS – although it is. It is also the indirect result of the expectation of interoperability that OGC has fostered in the geospatial community. We expect systems to talk to each other. I can connect QGIS to an ArcGIS Feature Service because being unable to do so is not acceptable.
But why is it unacceptable? My CRM vendor is completely unconcerned if I can’t connect to an ERP system with which they have no strategic partnership. I think it is unacceptable because of the nature of geography. It was stated in a number of ways at OGC@30 and I will paraphrase – everything exists someplace on Earth. Everything that happens does so in at least one location. Geography is central to everything in ways that other business disciplines are not.
Because of this, geography is key to the most critical issues of our time, as it was to the most critical issues being faced by the founders of OGC, as it will be to those who attend OGC@60. Whether we are dealing with climate change, food insecurity, internal displacement, sustainable development, conflict, or any other of the issues in today’s headlines, geography is at the core of all of them.
As a result, we simply do not have the luxury of allowing artificial barriers between our tools to get in the way of solving those problems. At this point in my career, I could not care less what icon someone double-clicks to start the work of processing data for wildfire response. What I do care about is that they are able to get the best result in the shortest amount of time. I firmly believe that openness is the best way to accomplish that. OGC constantly advocates for and enables openness and, for that, we should all be grateful.
