ABSTRACT

This chapter introduces the standardization approaches of the Location Interoperability Forum and Open Mobile Alliance and the Open Geospatial Consortium. Standards are concerned with ensuring that technology from one supplier will work and operate as it was meant to with technology from another supplier. Standards are expensive with respect to both financial and human capital. Standards are a solution to a market problem — enabling companies to agree on a common solution, which widens the market and simplifies the sales and purchasing of products. Due to missing or nontransparent standards, many enterprises pursued integration by extremely expensive ad hoc solutions. When standards are adopted, the ultimate technical benefit will be interoperability between systems and software from different vendors, allowing for the reuse and exchange of data, with seamless integration of the location information, into any existing network infrastructure. Standards adoption is a means to an important end — building critical mass in the development of interoperable data and services.