Cloudant has joined the Open Geospatial Consortium to integrate geospatial standards into its Cloudant NoSQL DBaaS
Database as a service provider Cloudant announced on Tuesday that it has joined the Open Geospatial Consortium to integrate geospatial standards into its Cloudant NoSQL DBaaS.
The Open Geospatial Consortium is an international association of more than 480 companies, government agencies, research organizations and universities that develop geospatial interoperability standards.
With its membership in the OGC, Cloudant said web, mobile and proprietary app developers can more easily introduce geospatial features and analytics into applications.
In a blog post Cloudant explains that it is building a geospatial platform on its existing core technology that supports distributed indices and multi-node queries, including a version that can be deployed by its hosting providers. The geospatial database will support unstructured data and will offer standard interfaces to disseminate geospatial data. Developers, including those with applications hosted in the Rackspace cloud that use the Cloudant NoSQL database as a service through the Cloud Tools program, will be able to leverage the geospatial platform in their applications.
“Cloudant’s membership in the OGC reflects the importance of geospatial information to application developers,” Raj Singh, director of interoperability programs for OGC said in a statement. “We share Cloudant’s vision of integrating geospatial technology and dynamic database queries and look forward to their contributions, both in our consortium and to the open-source community at large.”
Technology developers and cloud providers often join associations such as the OGC to inform policy around certain services, learn from other industry leaders, and create an open dialogue around specific technology segments, such as green data centers, for example, which is The Green Grid’s focus.
Geospatial technologies are used in many different types of applications. While app users have expressed concern with privacy, the type of data collected by geospatial technologies can be useful for businesses in many ways, including marketing. According to a report by Directions Mag, there are over 15 bills before Congress that would regulate the collection of geolocation information.
“With the explosive rise in sensor data, machine-to-machine communications and mobile computing, geospatial data processing is extremely important to our customers,” Alan Hoffman, Cloudant co-founder and chief product officer said in a statement. “We’re excited to be working with the OGC to further enhance Cloudant’s geospatial capabilities and to ensure future compatibility with developing geo standards. From the very beginning, we designed the Cloudant database service to be highly distributed and location-aware, and our participation in the OGC advances that strategy.”
Talk back: What do you think of Cloudant’s membership in the Open Geospatial Consortium? Is geospatial technology important to your developer clients? Let us know in a comment.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson is the Editor in Chief of the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
