ECCMA announced today the finalization of a memorandum of understanding with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to formalize the collaboration between the two organizations around the standardization of electronic real property information and identifiers.
The primary area of common interest is in advancement of Property Identification using ECCMA 1 Standards and KML. The two organizations will jointly investigate potential areas of collaboration for standards development, standards harmonization, and outreach and education. Also, they will identify, prepare and disseminate joint outreach materials including journal articles, white papers and related reference documentation, to improve understanding, support and application of jointly addressed standards areas and projects.
The effort includes the establishment of a joint workgroup to develop and promote implementation of the standard under the name ePROP (electronic property standardization). The mission of the workgroup is real property data content standardization and seeks to foster the adoption of standards published by the organizations. ePROP will include representatives from the memberships of ECCMA and OGC and also other organizations. The workgroup is chaired by Elizabeth Green, Principal Consultant with rel-e-vant Solutions. "The combination of expertise and credibility of these two standards organizations is exactly what is needed to bring new solutions to the realm of real property data," said Green. More information can be found at http://www.eccma-eprop.org.
"Quality identifiers and quality descriptions are core principals of the ECCMA organization. Quality data as defined by ISO 8000, the international standard for quality data, is simply portable data that meets requirements. The key (no pun intended) to quality data is the resolution of identifiers. All identifiers are copyright unless they have been created using an open standard or they have been put in the public domain. Being able to identify a property using an open or public domain identifier is critical to data integration and data exchange and ultimately the road to real time, verifiable quality data," said Peter Benson, Executive Director of ECCMA.
Mark Reichardt, President and CEO of OGC commented, "It’s extremely important to have standards for managing information about real property. It’s also extremely important for property information to be easily integrated with other kinds of spatial information. Planning, architecture, public health, emergency and disaster management and many other domains depend on it. We’re very pleased and excited to be part of this effort."