Meanings of OGC

By | March 21, 2022

According to abbreviationfinder, OGC stands for Open Geospatial Consortium, an international consortium, made up of a group of companies, government agencies and universities, focused on implementing interface standards to promote and facilitate the global and worldwide use of spatial information, associated standards as well as good practices, which allow Developers create information systems that can easily exchange geographic information and instructions with other information systems.

Origin

OGC was born in 1994 to make geographic information an integral element of the global information infrastructure. OGC is a The requirements diverge from complicated planning and control of Earth observation satellites to the visualization of simple cartographic images on the web, as well as the encoding of the location in just a few bytes for geotagging and messaging.

Mission

Its mission is to promote the use of free standards and technologies in the area of ​​Geographic Information and related areas. To achieve this, OGC solicits and encourages the participation, on a global scale, of providers and users of this type of technology.

Details

Of the total number of web services that OGC currently has, the best known and most used is the map service or Web Map Service (WMS). Despite their success, many of the existing implementations have many drawbacks for working with high-resolution or high-volume layers of data.

At present there are different tendencies that try to solve these problems; some software programmers, such as LizardTech, have opted for the use of advanced wavelet-like formats, such as MrSID, etc; On the other hand, others, such as OnEarh of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of NASA or MiraMon of the Center de Recerca Ecològica i Aplicacions Forestals (CREAF) of the UAB, have preferred to carry out an optimal implementation of geographic data based on a pre-rendering and fragmentation of the data, where each of these fragments or tiles is known as a “TILE.

All these approaches, based on keeping formats or internal structures more optimized, increase the speed of response time of the server, but the pure WMS client ignores them and does not participate in said optimizations. Tile-based clients, such as Google Maps, have demonstrated the usefulness of URL request caching services to further augment service, decreasing network traffic and removing redundant requests.

The line on which the OGC standards move are the standards for profiles, application schemas, interfaces, coding and documents of good practices. In the case of the OGC Reference Model, it refers to these standards and their relationship with the ISOS standards.

OGC Standards

The use of the standards implemented by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is defined from:

  • The Specifications Program (Specification Program, SP), where the Technical Committee (TC) and Planning Committee (PC) carry out a formal consensus process to carry out and check the OpenGIS Implementation Standards, guided by the specification development model called Specification Abstract. For this, a Standard Working Group (SWG) is always carried out, which is responsible for guaranteeing the guidelines established by the Abstract Specification.
  • The Interoperability Program (IP) where a group of ideas are made to increase the process of acceptance of the specifications. It is a program that allows you to define, document, improve and test OGC specifications.

Pan American Health Organization

Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). It is the specialized health agency of the inter-American system, headed by the OAS, and has also been affiliated with the WHO, since 1949, so that it is also part of the United Nations system. It is headquartered in Washington and is dedicated to controlling and coordinating policies that promote health and well-being in the American countries. The PAHO secretariat is the Pan American Sanitary Bureau, which functions as the WHO Regional Office for the Americas.

origins

Created 2 of December of 1902 in the International Sanitary Convention I, held in Washington DC, following the resolution of the Second International American Conference. PAHO was recognized as a specialized agency of the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1950.

Formerly known as the International Sanitary Bureau (1902-1923) and the Pan American Sanitary Bureau (1923); changed to its current name in 1958, keeping its secretariat the name of Pan American Sanitary Bureau.

Specialized offices

CEPIS (Pan American Center for Sanitary Engineering and Environmental Sciences) is the Basic Sanitation Unit of the Sustainable Development and Environmental Health Area (SDE) of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), Regional Office for the Americas of the World Organization of Health (WHO). It was created in 1968 and since then it has been operating in Lima, Peru. The Peruvian government provided the facilities and covers part of the operating expenses. It is part of the PAHO Health and Environment Division and carries out its activities with the support of the PAHO / WHO Representation Offices in the countries.

Directors of the Pan American Sanitary Bureau

  • Walter Wyman (USA) 1902-1911
  • Rupert Blue (USA) 1912-1920
  • Hugh Cumming (USA) 1920-1947
  • Fred Soper (USA) 1947-1959
  • Abraham Horwitz (Chile) 1959-1975
  • Héctor Acuña (Mexico) 1975-1983
  • Carlyle Guerra de Macedo (Brazil) 1983-1995
  • George Alleyne (Barbados) 1995-2003
  • Mirta Roses Periago (Argentina) 2003-2008
  • Mirta Roses Periago (Argentina) 2008-2013 (elected on 10/3/2007)
  • Carissa Etienne (Dominica) (2013-Present) (sworn in on January 31, 2013)

OGC