Synaptitude Consulting has signed a Memorandum of Agreement with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to promote the use of open geospatial standards in Smart Grid software and services to enable Smart Grid stakeholders to make the best possible use of the Smart Grid’s ubiquitous location information.

OGC president Mark Reichardt explains, “Synaptitude will enable us to better understand the language and needs of the diverse Smart Grid communities and help those communities understand their need for open geospatial standards. Our members have done a great job of providing the necessary technology. Synaptitude will help us bring these to a Smart Grid world that needs them.”

Every Smart Grid component has a location on the earth. Every grid event such as a power surge or transmission loss, occurs within some space on the grid’s physical network. Communicating location and other information will become increasingly important with smart technology. So gas and water utilities will need open geospatial standards as their businesses become more complex and IT-intensive.

Eric Nelson, Managing Principal at Synaptitude, notes, “The Smart Grid by definition has geospatial information at its core. OGC’s open geospatial information interoperability messaging standards can be a key enabler of the Smart Grid’s real-time location-based messaging layer.”

The OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding Standard is included in the United States National Institute for Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Framework and Roadmap for Smart Grid Interoperability, v1.0, and it is included as a spatial encoding in OASIS Energy Market Information Exchange (eMIX) and EnergyInterop standards documents.

An OGC Smart Grid Ad Hoc meeting, Geospatial Standards for the Smart Grid, will be held Tuesday, March 20, 8-10 a.m. as part of the OGC Technical Committee meeting in Austin, Texas. The public is invited. The meeting is free, but registration is required. For more information, visit www.opengeospatial.org.

Synaptitude provides IT systems consulting services. For more information, visit www.synaptitudeconsulting.com/solutions/smart_grid_solutions_center

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 435 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities committed to developing publicly available geospatial standards.

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