8 January 2013 -- The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) seeks public comments on the current draft of the candidate OGC GeoPackage (GPKG) Standard. The GPKG Standards Working Group will consider all comments when preparing a final draft of the candidate standard.

Mobile device users who require geospatial application services and associated data and who operate in disconnected or limited network connectivity environments frequently do not have open, available geospatial data to support their applications. Applications include such things as mobile workforce data capture and updates, volunteered geographic information, and real time annotations of map data in an emergency event.

The candidate OGC GeoPackage (GPKG) Standard provides an open, non-proprietary, platform-independent container for distribution and direct use of all kinds of geospatial data. The GeoPackage container and related API will increase the cross-platform interoperability of geospatial applications and web services in the mobile world.  Standard APIs for access and management of GeoPackage data will provide consistent query and update results across such applications and services.  

Future enhancements to the GeoPackage standard, a future GeoPackage Web Service standard, and modifications to existing OGC Web Service (OWS) standards to use GeoPackages as exchange formats will allow OWS to support provisioning of GeoPackages throughout an enterprise or information community.

Interoperability of GeoPackage implementations by several participants is being tested and will be demonstrated in the 15 January 2013 OGC Web Services Testbed (OWS-9) Demonstration. The current reference implementation bases, SQLite and SpatiaLite, are open source resources developed by OGC members. The SQLite reference implementation is sponsored in part by the SQLite Consortium, which includes a number of OGC members. SpatiaLite is built on OS-Geo open source libraries by the president of GFOSS.it and others.

The current draft of the candidate OGC GeoPackage (GPKG) Standard can be downloaded from http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/95.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 480 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.


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