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Government GIS

Industry body calls for comments on standards for location-enabled SMS

By Clarice Africa | 4 April 2011

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) seeks public input on the candidate Open GeoSMS Standard which would help define location-aware and location-based SMS applications more clearly.

According to the OGC, the reason for proposing Open GeoSMS is because Location Based Service (LBS) devices or applications of different brands or from different vendors are often unable to share LBS information with each other which poses a potential barrier to the development of the LBS industry. Open GeoSMS also opens up a host of new opportunities around location-enabled SMS.

A standard way of location-tagging SMS messages is important because SMS is by far the most common mobile messaging format and because location capabilities have become commone in cell phones and other mobile devies. The convenience of SMS is that the user only needs to send an SMS. If the user has enabled a location application on their device, and if the application implements the Open GeoSMS standard, the location information can be used instantly and seamlessly by a device that receives the message.

The OGC added that when using Open GeoSMS, there is no need to change existing systems or infrastructures, which means governments and other institutions, can efficiently use location-enabled SMS for applications that benefit the community in various ways.

To date, Taiwan has widely embraced the use of Open GeoSMS in commercial and disaster response applications, and other disaster response applications such as those provided by Sahana use Open GeoSMS.

The OGC is seeking public input on the Open GeoSMS standard through its website (opengeospatial.org) until the 24th of April 2011.

The OGC is an international industry consortium of more than 410 government agencies, companies, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards.

OGC standards supports interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the web, wireless, and location-based services.

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