The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is responsible for all geospatial standards throughout the world. OGC reached out to FOAM to present the future of a geospatial blockchain standards at their most recent Technical Meeting. We have been working on the first interoperable standard for geospatial on the blockchain — the Crypto-spatial Coordinate (CSC). Given the foremost role of OGC defining the industry’s geo standards, we are very excited to participate in the ongoing discussion of standards for geospatial distributed ledger.

We have been working on the first interoperable standard for geospatial on the blockchain — the Crypto-spatial Coordinate (CSC).

What is the OGC? The OGC is the only international organization responsible for global open standards for the geospatial community. Started over 25 years ago, the OGC works closely with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) building standards that are freely available for everyone to facilitate the sharing of the world’s geospatial data.

FOAM was invited to present our proposal for location-specific smart contracts — the Crypto-spatial Coordinate standard — for discussion at this year’s OGC Technical Meeting in Orleans, France.

OGC and FOAM working together are the first steps towards establishing a globally recognized standard for location-specific smart contracts.

The 106th OGC Technical Committee was held in Orléans, France.

Blockchains are changing the world we interact in — from the Internet of Things and Supply Chains to Mobility and Land Registries to Augmented Reality and Location-based Gaming. Standards can accelerate the interoperability of this work.

Currently, there are no standards for embedded locations, physical addresses, or coordinates in smart contracts. In order for location be interoperable on the blockchain, we are building a shared language to reference and index the physical world. OGC gets that. And so do we.

Currently, there are no standards for embedded locations, physical addresses, or coordinates in smart contracts.

We are committed to continue the conversation with the OGC and in alignment with the ISO Blockchain and the ISO Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technical Committee ISO/TC 307. Together we seek to build a shared interoperable geospatial blockchain standard.

Our proposal as articulated in the CSC is a human readable representation of a pair of a geohash and an Ethereum address, together with an immutable pairing of the two on the blockchain. This makes it possible to verify the CSC of a contract and its associated geohash.

Crypto-spatial coordinate presented by Kristoffer Josefsson (CTO) at OGCmeet, Orléans

Given our unique position as a leading entity dealing with geospatial blockchain applications, we support the adoption of blockchain standards with the support of other internationally recognized consortiums. With OGC and by extension ISO, we continue to work within current blockchain working groups at Trusted IoT Alliance, Ethereum Enterprise Alliance, the companies within ConsenSys, and the blockchain ecosystem as a whole.

Fundamental work is being done right now to build a decentralized Web 3.0. It is critical to build the geospatial standards and protocols to accelerate that future. Our community implementation of standards will echo throughout our blockchain and physical worlds together.