The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is a voluntary consensus standards organization whose mission is to serve as a global collaborative forum for the development, promotion and harmonization of open and freely available geospatial standards. From the Alerting and Warning community perspective, the OGC believes that cross standards collaboration and harmonization is critical. To that end, the OGC does not define alerting or warning encoding or protocol standards. The OGC does actively participate in other standards organizations activities that do define and maintain encoding or protocol standards for alerts and warnings. These include collaboration activities with the IETF, OASIS, and NENA. The consistent expression of location in the emergency services and response stack increases effectiveness and reduces risk.

While the OGC does not define alerting encoding and protocol standards, the Membership does have a very active interest in geospatially enabled applications and infrastructures that do generate alerts and warnings. An example is the Debris Flow Monitoring System in Taiwan

In subsequent postings, I will describe a variety of OGC activities related to how OGC standards combined with existing alerting and warning standards, such as CAP, provide effective, operational applications and infrastructures that support the requirements of the alerting and warning community.