SCO & SKM collaborate in Global Project

Social Change Online and SKM collaboration in Global Project to validate geospatial software

Australian companies Social Change Online and Sinclair Knight Merz are taking part in an international Project to test and evaluate geospatial software for the benefit of all GIS (Geographic Information Systems) developers and users across the globe.

The Project, called CITE (the Conformance and Interoperability Test and Evaluation Initiative), was launched late last year by the Open GIS Consortium (OGC).

OGC is an international industry consortium of more than 230 companies, government agencies and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geoprocessing specifications.

The Australian participants in the CITE Project - Web developer, Social Change Online (SCO) and leading consulting firm, Sinclair Knight Merz - are the only Australian industry members of OGC.

The two companies are collaborating to develop the guidelines and protocols that will enable the automated testing of online GIS services for their conformance to OGC Specifications.

They are also building the Internet portal for the project, through which users can have their GIS service automatically tested for conformance.

The CITE Initiative is part of OGC's Interoperability Program - a global, collaborative, hands-on engineering and testing program that ensures geospatial software operates effectively with hardware, data and other software.

In OGC's Interoperability Initiatives, international teams of technology providers work together to solve specific geoprocessing interoperability problems posed by the Initiatives' Sponsors.

Maurits van der Vlugt, a senior GIS Consultant at Sinclair Knight Merz, said that "the outcome from CITE will
be a consortium-approved facility through which software vendors can test and validate their products' conformance with OGC's Web-based OpenGIS specifications."

OpenGIS Specifications specify common interfaces, encodings and schemas that support the development and deployment of interoperable geospatial solutions, services, data, and applications. The Specifications aim to 'geo-enable' the Web and mainstream IT, and empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and usable with all kinds of applications across the Internet.

"As the producers of geoprocessing products modernise their OpenGIS based offerings, users seek verification that the vendor's product conforms with the OpenGIS Specifications. The CITE Initiative provides a clear path to assure them of the products' interoperability with other spatial servers and clients," Mr van der Vlugt said.

"It also provides the methodology, tools and testing framework that developers need to distinguish their products from non-conformant products, and which buyers take as their guarantee of interoperability," he added.

In addition to the Social Change Online and Sinclair Knight Merz team in Australia, other participants and teams involved in the Project include: The Open Group (UK); Galdos Systems (Canada); Northrop Grumman

Information Technology TASC (US); and a team of The Open Planning Project (US); The Centre for Computational Geography at the University of Leeds (UK); lat/lon (Germany); National Center for Atmospheric Research (US); Universitat Jaume I (Spain); Intergraph (US); and IONIC Software (Belgium).