Association for Geographic Information (AGI)
1Spatial is a member of the Association for Geographic Information (AGI). The AGI exists to represent the interests of the UK's geographic information industry; a wide-ranging group of public and private sector organisations, suppliers of GI software, hardware, data and services, consultants, academics and interested individuals. It draws together a previously disparate GI community to share ideas on best practice, experience and innovation, and offers access to unparalleled networking opportunities with significant business benefits. As such it avoids partisan positions and tries to act on behalf of the community as whole. Since its inception in 1988, it has built up a significant membership base and established itself as the respected voice in GI.
The AGI:
- Promotes geographic information in the market place
- Educates the GI community user
- Represents the industry and its members to public policy makers
- Raises awareness within the wider IT and business communities
- Ensures appropriate industry standards exist
- Provides a focus for the GI community
- Encourages best practice and innovation
- Supports geographic information in education
- Provides unique member benefits
1Spatial is involved in a number of AGI Special Interest Groups (SIGs), such as the Local Government, Technical and Utilities SIGs. Steven Ramage, our Business Development Director, also sits on the AGI Action Working Group for INSPIRE.
We participate in a number of AGI events throughout the year and were highly commended in the Innovation & Best Practice (Central Government) category in the 2008 AGI Awards.
We are also proud to have also previously won two prestigious AGI awards:
2006 Award for Innovation and Best Practice (Private Sector)
2005 Award for Innovation and Best Practice (Central Government)
Association for Geographic Information (AGI) website
Autodesk Developer Network
The Autodesk Developer Network is one of Autodesk's partnership schemes and exists to provide support for full-time, professional developers who want to or already are building software based on Autodesk products and technologies.
As a member of the Autodesk Developer Network, 1Spatial is able to customise Autodesk technology to broaden our developments and improve our service. Having direct developer support from Autodesk ensures that we can maintain high-quality development and provide cascading benefits to our partners as well as integrating appropriate technology into 1Spatial products.
Autodesk Developer Network website
Cambridge Network
Cambridge is Europe's largest technology cluster and 1Spatial is proud to be part of it. The city is home to thousands of technology companies and 1Spatial is one of the largest. We are keen to play a key role in this community and one way of achieving this is through membership of the Cambridge Network.
The Cambridge Network was established to link like-minded people from business and academia to each other and to the global high technology community for the benefit of the Cambridge region. It enables its members to work together and leverage their collective resources in new ways for the benefit of technology-enabled enterprise and adjacent stakeholders in the Cambridge region.
The organisation achieves this by using a variety of technology, knowledge and people-based tools to enhance business processes both on a local and a global scale. Members have a duty to act in a responsible, cost-effective and fair manner and to achieve the highest standards in quality of service in order to uphold the traditions and sustain the progress of the Cambridge Phenomenon.
1Spatial has belonged to the Cambridge Network since 2002 and continues to support the innovation and inward investment the Cambridge Network generates for its members.
Cambridge Network website
DNF
The Digital National Framework (DNF) is a developing industry standard for integrating and sharing business and geographic information from multiple sources.
The vision for DNF is to enable and support easy and reliable integration of business and geographic information regardless of who is responsible for its maintenance and where this is undertaken, thus achieving the goal of "plug and play information".
Ultimately this has the potential to evolve into a network of information which, while distributed, when brought together can be used with assurance. Business information can then be shared with the knowledge that all users have confidence that they are referring to the same location and entity in the real world. This can be critical in many applications.
The Digital National Framework is intended to be:
- Definitive - maximising the benefits of definitive referencing
- Inclusive - reflecting principles of industry best practice
- Structured - using effective techniques for a “create once, use many times” model
- Reliable - delivering data integrity for underpinning critical business decisions
- Cost-effective - lowering the costs of handling multi-source data
- Flexible - enabling information exchange and cross-business applications
The DNF aims to create a structured model of national reference datasets, which will support consistent integration of geographic information, leading to easy, automated exchange and analysis of application information from different sources. The DNF will also aim to establish a consistent approach to georeferencing and in the modelling, integrity and connectivity of geographic information. It is this referencing structure that will allow for the continued maintenance of the data relative to the DNF.
The building blocks will be real world objects which are application-neutral and captured once for use by more than one application. An example would be a building, or area of road surface. It is conceptualised in the following diagram:
Figure – cross referencing and linking multiple sources, such as NLPG and TOIDs
1Spatial attended the inaugural meeting on DNF and has been an advocate for its principles since that time. As well as attending and contributing to the DNF Expert Committee, 1Spatial also provides a staff member for DNF Marketing Communications.
How DNF is supporting the UK Location Information Infrastructure.
DNF website
LRQA (Lloyds Register Quality Assurance - ISO9001)
LRQA provides independent, impartial third party evaluation and judgement, giving companies a credible means for addressing stakeholder concerns. This is done by means of the review, inspection or verification of aspects of a business, according to a defined and published set of criteria such as recognised standards or schemes. 1Spatial utilises LRQA as their external assessment agency.
1Spatial is unique in the Geographical Information Systems market, having been ISO9001/TickIT assured continuously since February 1994. The standard is maintained by locally generated internal audits and biannual external audits, both of which help our business to remain customer focussed and achieve its objectives. 1Spatial welcomes its customers to undertake second party assessments of our processes as we strive for further improvement.
LRQA (Lloyds Register Quality Assurance - ISO9001) website
Open Geospatial Consortium
The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc (OGC) is a non-profit, international industry consortium of 368 companies, government agencies and universities, participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface specifications. OpenGIS® Specifications support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, as well as mainstream IT. The specifications empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful with all kinds of applications.
1Spatial has been an active participant in many OGC Interoperability Initiatives including the Web Mapping Testbeds, Web Services, the Military Pilot Project, Geography Markup Language (GML), the Web Feature Server specification and the harmonisation of ISO TC211 and OGC specifications. From 1996 to 2003 1Spatial was a member at Technical Committee level and co-hosted the first OGC meeting held outside North America.
Currently, 1Spatial is an Associate Member of the OGC and chairs the Data Quality Working Group. The most recent initiative we were involved in was the OWS4 Web Services Initiative, working on an on-line topology quality assessment service. The results of this initiative can be seen on the OGC website.
Participation in the OGC ensures that:
- We keep up to date with the latest technology being developed in the mainstream IT industry
- Our users and potential technology partners are provided with a business development network
Our technology performs to the highest industry standards, whilst our corporate philosophy remains committed to openness and partnerships.
Open Geospatial Consortium website
Open Source Geospatial Foundation
The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) is a not-for-profit organisation whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. The foundation provides financial, organisational and legal support to the broader open source geospatial community. It also serves as an independent legal entity to which community members can contribute code, funding and other resources, secure in the knowledge that their contributions will be maintained for public benefit. OSGeo also serves as an outreach and advocacy organisation for the open source geospatial community, and provides a common forum and shared infrastructure for improving cross-project collaboration. The foundation's projects are all freely available and useable under an OSI-certified open source license.
OSGeo has been created to support and build the highest quality open source geospatial software and 1Spatial is a Foundation Sponsor. The foundation's goal is to encourage the use and collaborative development of community-led projects like Autodesk's MapGuide Open Source. As a result of the success experienced with this project, incorporating Feature Data Objects (FDO), we have implemented an FDO data access bridge to read spatial data sources for mining and aggregating spatial data integration through Radius Studio and MapRelate. Radius Studio is used to assess spatial data quality and determine the fitness for purpose of data sources and MapRelate is a spatial extension for AutoCAD users.
Case Study
Building Data Bridges: Autodesk FDO Data Access Technology and 1Spatial's Radius Studio
Read more
Open Source Geospatial Foundation website
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