15. How Standards Help the Geospatial Industry Keep Pace with Advancing Technology

This chapter describes how, beginning in the 1990s, the information technology (IT) industry moved into a new paradigm based on widespread networking of computers. This new paradigm forced map production and geoinformation management system providers and users to adapt accordingly. Widespread networking of computers brings the opportunity for widespread discovery, sharing and integration of data. This cannot happen, however, without widespread agreement on standard protocols, data models, encodings and best practices. The The inherent complexity of geospatial information (Longley et al. 2015) imposes particular interoperability problems that can only be resolved through a geo-focused standards development process. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) emerged to lead this progress, coordinating with many other organizations. It appears that the geospatial standards development process will be ongoing as long as the underlying information technology platform continues to evolve and new spatial technology user domains emerge and evolve.