GeoSPARQL Working Group formed

As a charter member of the OGC GeoSPARQL Standard Working Group, i3mainz is contributing to the extension of the GeoSPARQL standard. Mainz University of Applied Sciences became an OGC member again in August 2020 and is entitled to cast one vote in all registered working groups. At present, Timo Homburg is registered as the representative of Mainz University of Applied Sciences.  The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international consortium of more than 500 businesses, government agencies, research organizations, and universities driven to make geospatial (location) information and services FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.   GeoSPARQL extends the query language SPARQL for the Semantic Web with functions that allow the comparison of vector geometries. The extension of the GeoSPARQL standard is intended, among other things, to support additional geodata formats and how the language handles raster data, along with improved support for 3D geometries. In a one-year founding process, the white paper OGC Benefits of Representing Spatial Data Using Semantic and Graph Technologies was written to illustrate the broad use of the existing GeoSPARQL standard and to present possible extensions.  The subsequently drafted Working Group Charter governs the work of the group and gives charter members, including i3mainz, a voting right to adopt the final standard. The standardization process will take an estimated two years and can be followed publicly on Github.