Once upon a time, geospatial industry was confined to being a small, specialised market. Products and services in this market were understood mainly by technologists and sold mainly to large government and corporate customers. Market development was delayed by the difficulties in moving data between dissimilar systems and the difficulties in integrating geospatial technology with other kinds of systems. Not only did different vendors use very different approaches in solving the basic programming and data management problems associated with GIS, earth imaging, facilities management and navigation, but these disciplines each involved quite different technologies and data models that hindered data integration and fusion.

The “democratisation” of geospatial information began with the advent of Internet-based distributed processing in the 1990s. The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC), originally the “Open GIS Consortium”, was founded in 1994 by major GIS users and providers. The original vision for the new Consortium was the possibility of developing open, consensus-based interface and encoding standards that would enable system-to-system communication of geoprocessing instructions over networks, as well as between systems on a single computer. The OGC developed a formal consensus process, recruited a broad-based international membership (now more than 350 organisations) and has now developed a suite of standards that have become well-known and widely used in the industry.

Markets do not change overnight, partly because market education takes time, and partly because customers usually choose to get as much use as possible out of the systems they own before buying new ones. Vendors too prefer to get as much returns as possible out of their investments in product development and marketing. But the geospatial market is definitely changing as end customers and solutions providers turn to products and services that interoperate through open interfaces and encodings based on standards from the OGC, ISO and other standards organisations.