OGC Prototyping US Government's Open Platform "GeoSpatial One-Stop Portal”

April 22, 2003

Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)

Wayland, MA, -- The Open GIS Consortium (OGC) announced today that work on the Geospatial One Stop Portal architecture and prototype is well underway by OGC member companies.As of this date, the following companies are actively participating or have agreed to provide technology: Compusult, CubeWerx, Galdos Systems, SAIC, Autodesk, Intergraph, PCI Geomatics, Sapient Technology, Questerra, Oracle and Northrop Grumman Information Technology, TASC.Twenty companies offered proposals in response to a December, 2002 Request for Quotations (RFQ)/Call for Participation (CFP) in the OGC Geospatial One-Stop Portal Initiative (GOS-PI).

The goal of the GOS-PI is to build a standards-based architecture and prototype for a portal that will provide geospatial information discovery, access, and mapping in the US.The portal implementation will be a "prototype" in the literal sense of a first working example on which future instances will be based.OGC is partnering with the Geospatial One-Stop (GOS) project on this work.Led by the Department of the Interior, GOS is one of 24 US Office of Management and Budget E-Government initiatives to improve effectiveness, efficiency, and customer service throughout all layers of government.Geospatial One-Stop builds upon National Spatial Data Infrastructure objectives to enhance interoperability among geographic components of government activities.More information about Geospatial One-Stop is available at http://www.geo-one-stop.gov.

David Schell, President of OGC, said, "The GOS Portal will be a key feature of e-Government in this country and it will be imitated around the world, so it is extremely important that it is, from the outset, an exemplar of multi-vendor interoperability.If GOS stays on course with an open, non-proprietary approach, it will be completely in alignment with the spirit and letter of Section 210 of the E-Government Act of 2002, which mandates the Department of Interior 'to promote the development of interoperable GIS technologies for low-cost use and sharing of geographic data by government entities and the public'."

Jack Pellicci, Brigadier General, US Army (ret); Group Vice President, Business Development, Oracle Government, Education and Health, said, "The GOS Portal is a significant initiative that will allow government, citizens, industry and academia to share critical geospatial information more efficiently and effectively and will accelerate the development of interoperable geospatially enabled applications."

This initiative, under the auspices of Geospatial One-Stop, is being sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Federal Geographic Data Committee, the US Department of Agriculture, and the US Geological Survey. As detailed in the OGC RFQ, the initiative sponsors and participants are working to refine and document the technical architecture of the Geospatial One-Stop Portal.In the initiative, participants and supporting organizations will develop, demonstrate and install a working prototype implementation based on that architecture.

James R.O'Neill, President of Northrop Grumman Information Technology TASC said, "The Geospatial One-Stop Portal is a key enabler for the program to allow government to government sharing of geospatial information.As a leader in critical, protected, custom-synthesized information engineering products and services for the national and homeland security communities, we support the federal government's integration of products from vendors using OGC specifications to build a truly interoperable access and dissemination mechanism for geospatial data."

GOS-PI is part of OGC's Interoperability Program, a global, collaborative, hands-on engineering and testing program that rapidly delivers proven candidate specifications into OGC's Specification Program, where they are formalized for public release.In OGC's Interoperability Initiatives, international teams of technology providers work together to solve specific geoprocessing interoperability problems posed by the Initiative's sponsoring organizations.

ABOUT CUBEWERX INC.
Founded in 1996, CubeWerx has been developing standard-based off the shelf software products (SCOTS) in response to Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) requirements for interoperable information infrastructures. CubeWerx is an innovative software company whose expertise includes development, marketing and selling of Web Services and Spatial Warehousing software products. These products and other location-based software product components support the most demanding requirements for the integration, access, and management of very large volumes of Spatial Data over the web. CubeWerx products such as CubeXPLOR, CubeSERV and CubeSTOR were developed using open and interoperable specifications from the Open GIS Consortium. These products allow organizations responsible for Geospatial data to respond to their most demanding client requirements and offer them on-line Web services in a multi-vendor products environment. More information on CubeWerx is available on the Internet at www.cubewerx.com.

For more information please contact:
Edric Keighan (CubeWerx)
Tel.: (819) 771-8303 x207
E-mail

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