20 November 2014 – The OGC seeks comment on the charter for a new OGC Standards Working Group (SWG) being formed to develop an OGC standard for disseminating relatively small “tiles” of geospatial data to lightweight devices. This group will also define in detail how existing widely used OGC standards can be used to support data tiling functionality.

Mobile computing has become pervasive in most parts of the world. The OGC Web Coverage Tile Service (“WC Tiles”) SWG will address the needs of users who need timely, compact, geospatial data or data products for their location or point of interest and for whom the overheads of other geospatial service interfaces may be too demanding of their mobile devices’ computing resources, battery life or bandwidth.

The new standard will be directly analogous to the OGC Web Map Tile Service, which provides for downloading tiles of pre-formatted image tiles to a client device on demand. Those images are encoded in the relatively simple image formats commonly used in websites. OGC Web Coverage Tiling Service ‘data cubes’ will be able to transfer virtually any type of complex spatial data, such as multi-dimensional atmospheric or ocean data, hyperspectral Earth images or even vector geometry.

The draft charter for the OGC Web Coverage Tile Service Standards Working Group is available at    https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=60231. Send comments on the charter to charter-requests [at]  opengeospatial.org.

The 30 day public comment period ends 20 December 2014. After the ad hoc group seeking to form the new SWG has addressed comments received in response to this Request for Comments (RFC) the draft charter will be submitted to the OGC Technical Committee and Planning Committee for their review and likely approval.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 495 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. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/.