OpenGIS® Specification Marks New Era of Geo-Information Access
This first release of OpenGIS interfaces (OGC Request Number 1: OpenGIS Simple Features) was the result of an extraordinary collaborative effort among members, many of whom normally compete with each other.Since August, 1994, the OGC committees have met to solve technical and market problems that have restricted the sharing of digital geographic data.The OpenGIS Simple Features submission for SQL (via the ODBC application programming interface) was the result of a joint submission by ESRI, IBM Corporation (Poughkeepsie, NY), Informix Software, Inc., MapInfo Corporation, and Oracle Corporation.The leading database vendors have already delivered versions of relational database systems t hat can store complex geographic data.The OpenGIS Simple Features Specification for SQL makes it possible to create open interfaces on these servers which will make the data accessible to client applications that understand these interfaces.