Iria Rodríguez  | Researcher

In the last years, the number of sensors distributed all over the world has increased notably. Sensors dedicated to emergency detection, environmental quality control, safety surveillance or many others demand scalable management.

This has raised the need of the definition of a series of specifications to allow an efficient administration of the information that those sensors generate. Furthermore, due to the nature of the measured data, geolocation information associated to sensed data is often relevant. In order to face these challenges the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) was created, being the most important project on the topic nowadays.

OGC is an international industry consortium of 462 companies, government agencies and universities that collaborate in the development of standard interfaces. The goal of OGC standards is to create interoperable solutions for communications supporting geolocation.

OGC divides its effort in several communities covering numerous areas, such as aeronautical, business intelligence, geosciences and environment, mobile Internet and service location, sensor web communications, etc. These communities solve problems related to spatial information creation, communication and usage in their fields of interest.

Gradiant is evaluating the possibility of using some OGC standards. Specifically, those related to the Sensor Webs community could be particularly interesting for surveillance projects under development.