Aim: Babel is a 1Spatial project investigating the foundations to enable 1Spatial technology to access web-based geographic systems. These geospatial and location based services are all implemented using a number of standards originally defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), including Geography Markup Language (GML), based on XML. GML is used to define the encoding of geographic data, for example features such as roads or houses. Having a standard format for this permits far simpler communication and processing of data - applications supporting GML can be used by anyone who can produce GML, regardless of internal storage formats; it also permits organisations to easily share data, for example to help in disaster recovery situations. A number of iterations of GML have been produced and it is now being standardised by ISO (ISO 19136).

Approach: Babel is producing a software library to allow 1Spatial's core technology to read and write data in GML based formats. This is a complex process since it has to dynamically adjust to a particular application of GML. Rather than specifying a modelling language for roads and houses, GML provides a mechanism to define that language, known as an application schema of GML. Babel aims to interpret any application schema definition, configure 1Spatial technology to process this and be able to quickly transfer GML data.