ECMWF has upgraded its membership of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) from Associate to Technical membership. The move means that ECMWF will be able to vote and actively drive work at OGC. Over the past few months, ECMWF has already taken part in various votes, requests for comments, and a hackathon.
ECMWF joined OGC as an associate member in 2010. Together with several national weather services, it has been active in OGC’s MetOcean Domain Working Group since its inception to represent the needs of our community and provide input on new standards and best practice documents. OGC sets standards for the provision of geospatial data, such as weather information and environmental data, through web services. Following these standards enables interoperability between the different services and client applications users might use. This is especially important for the two EU-funded Copernicus services implemented by ECMWF when providing services for partners and users who are not familiar with the standards of the meteorological community. Using OGC web standards ensures they can easily integrate these services into their applications. OGC and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) have signed a memorandum of understanding to ensure that these two standards bodies work closely together.
What is the Open Geospatial Consortium?
The Open Geospatial Consortium is an international consortium of more than 530 businesses, government agencies, research organizations, and universities driven to make geospatial information and services FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. OGC’s members create free geospatial standards. OGC also actively analyses emerging tech trends, and runs an agile, collaborative Research and Development lab that builds and tests innovative solutions to members’ use cases. For more information, visit: www.ogc.org.
Marie-Françoise Voidrot, Director of the Innovation Program at OGC, welcomed the membership upgrade. She said: “As an OGC Innovation Director, and also as a meteorologist, I welcome ECMWF’s decision to upgrade to the Technical level. The Centre’s experience in Earth observation, forecasting, and operational product delivery will be valuable across all OGC programmes and committees. ECMWF’s two EU-funded Copernicus services, delivered using OGC Standards, have broadly improved the accessibility of valuable data and products. OGC looks forward to working with ECMWF to advance open, interoperable, and efficient Earth science capabilities for a sustainable future.”