In its formal announcement for a Request for Quotation and Call for Participation in the Geospatial Information for Sustainable Development Initial Capability Pilot (GISD-ICP), the OGC said it will provide participants with cost-sharing funds to partially offset expenses. The funding is being provided by the OGC in collaboration with the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The objective of the project is to help make geographic information more accessible and useful to decision makers working on sustainable development problems, said the OGC.

At the moment, access to and sharing of geographic information is hampered by the lack of interoperability between types of geo-processing systems, vendor brands, data sources, and computing platforms. Researchers now must spend considerable time visiting multiple web sites, conducting many different queries, downloading files, reconciling different vendor formats and bringing all the data into the same Spatial Reference System so that the information can be used.

The OGC said the project will result in a limited but operational framework of interoperable clients and servers operating as a single network and enabling data sharing by transparent communication among Standard Commercial Off the Shelf software products with interoperability interfaces based on OpenGIS Specifications from OGC.

For more information: http://www.opengis.org