WAYLAND, Mass. -  The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Korea Forum and the Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements (KHRIS) co-hosted an OGC Interoperability Day event on 18 November at the KHRIS facility in Gyeonggi-do, South Korea.

The day-long program included talks by business, government and academic leaders on topics related to geospatial standardization and interoperability in the context of ubiquitous information services. A key talk was by Dr. Hyong-Bok Kim of the Korea Land & Housing Corporation. He spoke about the National U-City testbed development program, which takes full advantage of OGC Standards. A U-City, or "ubiquitous city", is one in which virtually all information systems -- residential, medical, business, and governmental -- share data, and computers and sensors are fully integrated into the built environment.

As a follow up to the event, Dr. Hyong-Bok Kim and Jinsoo You, Chair of OGC Korea, will present an "Introduction to the Korea U-City initiative" on Monday, 7 December at the OGC Technical Committee Meeting (http://www.opengeospatial.org/event/0912tcagenda) in Mountain View, California. Representatives from other Korean organizations will also speak in the Technical Committee's Sensor Web, Geosemantic, and 3D meetings.

Korean companies and organizations are becoming increasingly active in the OGC standardization process as major geospatial programs get underway in Korea. A catalyst for this involvement is the OGC Korea Forum. The Forum was chartered in 2009 to provide government, academic, research and industry organizations in Korea with opportunities to learn about and discuss issues related to interoperability of geographic information.

In addition to the U-City standardization efforts, the OGC Korea Forum is also developing strategies for a seamless geospatial service network across Korea that seeks to organize resources from IT industry, government, mass market websites, public utility services, U-Cities and research groups to create a very large scale, high-density, nationwide geospatial information testbed.

The OGCr is an international consortium of more than 385 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org.