MAGIC Services Sponsors Navteq, Telcontar, and Tele Atlas proposed extension of the OGC OLS 1.1 specification to include a Tracking Service based on lightweight and native protocols used by wireless phones and GPS devices. The Tracking Service would support secure aggregation and distribution of location information for wireless phones and other connected and positioned mobile devices. Applications include fleet management and dispatch, emergency response, asset tracking, and facility management.
MAGIC Sponsor MobileGIS contributed an architect (the MAGIC Editor) to lead this development through 2005. The final result was a demonstration in OGC’s Open Web Services 3 (OWS-3) Testbed showing a server implementation by the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Labs and client implementations by MAGIC Sponsor Telcontar and Skyline Software. MAGIC Sponsors Navteq and Tele Atlas supplied road data. The Tracking Service design was documented in an OGC Draft Interoperability Program Report (DIPR) 05-024r0. A DIPR is the first step in introducing experimental results into the OGC standards process. We anticipate adding the Tracking Service to a revision of OGC’s OLS 1.1 recommendation through the OLS Revision Working Group (OLS-RWG) during 2006.

The focus is on wider testing of the Tracking Service in the OGC OWS-4 Testbed, addition of support for the Geocoding and Reverse Geocoding Services in and near buildings to enable pedestrian navigation, and conformance testing to allow OLS implementations to test their adherence to the OLS recommendations. The bulk of the work will be within the OGC OWS-4 Testbed through in-kind contributions from MAGIC Sponsors deCarta (Telcontar), MobileGIS, Navteq, and Tele Atlas. Follow-on work will take the DIPR documenting 2005 results and the new products from OWS-4 into the OGC Technical Committee as revisions to OLS 1.1.