OGC and SIG 3D Advance Standards for 3D Digital Cities

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

OGC and SIG 3D Advance Standards for 3D Digital Cities

January __, 2011 – The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) and SIG 3D recently signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to work together in standards development and promotion of standards for Web based geospatial technologies in urban modeling.

SIG 3D members developed CityGML (http://www.citygml.org), a comprehensive open data model framework and XML-based encoding standard for the storage and exchange of virtual 3D urban models. CityGML, submitted by SIG 3D to the OGC in 2005, is now an OGC standard. CityGML is an application schema of the OpenGIS Geography Markup Language 3 (GML3) Encoding Standard (http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/gml), an international standard for spatial data exchange and encoding approved by the OGC and ISO. CityGML has been adopted as part of the European Union's common spatial data infrastructure, INSPIRE.

"Three-dimensional models of cities and regions play an increasingly important role in domains such as architecture, urban and regional planning, surveying, location-based marketing, mobile telecommunications, facilities management, environmental management and emergency and disaster response," said Mark Reichardt, president and CEO of the
OGC. "All of these domains need standards organizations to bridge the standards gap between geospatial technologies and design technologies, and the OGC is at the center of this bridging activity, thanks to SIG 3D's leadership. We are fortunate to have their continuing support and participation."

"The widespread use of CityGML within Europe is important to allow a consistent provision of data sets, which can be handled by all systems and thereby bringing benefits to the user.," stated Dr. Egbert Casper, Speaker of SIG 3D."The SIG 3D will continue working on the CityGML standard an its implementation in various application domains."

SIG 3D (http://www.sig3d.org/) is a special interest group of the German National Spatial Data Infrastructure (GDI-DE). The members of SIG 3D come from all over Germany and the bordering European countries. New members from anywhere in Europe are welcome.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 405 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

Contact:
Steven Ramage
Executive Director, Marketing and Communications
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
Bergen, Norway
sramage@opengeospatial.org
Phone: +47 9862 6865