VENDOR COMMUNITY

1. Locating Accessing Data & VENDOR COMMUNITY Objectives Activities WGISS members who are also members of the Open GIS Consortium (OGC) have created the OGC Earth Observation Special Interest Group (EO SIG) to function as a communications channel between the EO community and the OGC. Since OGC members include many major commercial vendors of software and systems relevant to the Earth Observation community, the EO SIG provides an ideal venue for information exchange. WGISS invites interested vendors of SCOTS products and systems to attend WGISS subgroup meetings where they can present information about their product activities WGISS subgroup meetings and learn about WGISS needs. Commercial products are reaching levels of capability and scalability needed by space agencies that collect, manage, and distribute what are among the largest data holdings in existence. Where in the past agencies would have to construct custom-built systems, it is now possible to employ Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) products. Increasingly, information systems standards are being implemented within COTS products. This has led to what is becoming known as Standards-based COTS (I.e. SCOTS). A key objective of WGISS is to open a dialogue between the commercial sector and the space agencies to further influence the development of applicable SCOTS products as well as to demonstrate to the commercial sector that there is a market for SCOTS products and systems. Downloads and Reference Material Further information on the OGC EO SIG can be found at http://lennier.gsfc.nasa.gov/eosig/ Information on WGISS can be found at http://wgiss.ceos.org/ A key standard for WGISS has been the OGC Web Map Server specification that has been implemented by a large number of vendors (Ionic Software SA of Belgium and CubeWerx Inc. of Canada are shown)