MoreCquay has achieved a significant milestone by demonstrating its Common Ground location services platform using an Open Location Services (OpenLS) compliant interface (XLS v1.0). Cquay is the first in the world to demonstrate an online geocoding and map portrayal service based on this important new specification.
The goal of OpenLS (www.openls.org), an Open GIS Consortium (OGC) initiative (www.opengis.org), is to develop standards needed by industry to support implementation of the location services invoked by mobile or wireless Internet devices. David Schell, President of OGC stated: "Similar to the way that HTTP protocols enabled the growth of activity in the World Wide Web, OpenLS standards, resulting from OGC's cooperative testbed process, have the potential to enable significant growth of Location Services markets in the Wireless Web."
Along with Cquay, other OpenLS-1 Testbed participants include: Galdos (Canada) with Hitachi (Japan), Galdos with NTT Data (Japan), BigTribe, Intergraph's IntelliWhere division with Compaq and Navigation Technologies, ESRI, IBM, University of Illinois, LocatioNet, MapInfo, Telecommunications Systems (TCI), SignalSoft, Sun Microsystems, Syncline, Navigation Technologies, MobileGIS (Ireland) with Telcontar and Tele Atlas (Netherlands), Opt[e]way (France), SICAD Geomatics (Siemens) (Germany), Vodafone (UK), Webraska, Ionic (Belgium), Laser-Scan (UK) with Yeoman Group (UK) and Tata Infotech (India).
