Joana Simoes

In January 2022, OSGeo and [OGC](https://www.ogc.org/) signed a new and [updated version of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU)](https://www.ogc.org/pressroom/pressreleases/4709) that aims to maximize the achievement of the mission and goals of the two organizations: promoting the use of Open Standards and Open source software within the geospatial developer community. Identifying open source technologies that could be used as Reference Implementations for OGC Standards and validating OGC compliance tests are examples of activities that can take place within the scope of the agreement. More than one year after the agreement was signed and almost one year after it was introduced to the OSGeo community in a keynote at FOSS4G 2022, this presentation will summarize all activities accomplished and future plans, including the establishment of the OSGeo Standards Committee within OSGeo and the organisation of the [3rd joint code sprint](https://developer.ogc.org/sprints/20/), in Switzerland, together with the Apache Software Foundation. The presentation will also reiterate the benefits of the new agreement, which allows OSGeo charter members to represent the priorities of OSGeo in the development of OGC Standards and supporting documents and services.

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Other people: Tom Kralidis Angelos Tzotsos Codrina Ilie

The need to integrate geospatial data into products and services has resulted in a proliferation of Free and Open Source web APIs which often do not adopt any standards, thus requiring more development time and a lack of interoperability between solutions. For instance a bounding box has been written in multiple ways, depending on whether developers use the coordinates of the four corners, only upper left and lower right, latitude or longitude first, or some other variation. The good news is that the Open Geospatial Consortium, a neutral, consensus-based organization, has been developing open standards for geospatial information. These standards are [developed as building blocks](https://blocks.ogc.org/), which means they could be easily incorporated into existing applications in order to enable a piece of geospatial functionality. The [location building blocks](https://blocks.ogc.org/register.html) are freely available to anyone to download and use. In this presentation, we describe the conceptual model for the existing building blocks, which uses semantic annotations to define the different components. We also describe a practical example of how a building block could be integrated into an application and provide some resources for developers who want to build applications with the location building blocks.

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Other people: Alejandro Villar Rob Atkinson Piotr Zaborowski