Cloud application data specialist Cloudant this week makes note of its new membership of the Open Geospatial Consortium, an international group focused on the development of geospatial interoperability standards. The firm says that it aims to integrate geospatial standards into the Cloudant NoSQL DataBase-as-a-Service (DBaaS) so that web, mobile, and proprietary app developers can introduce new geospatial features and analytics into their applications.

NOTE: OGC standards are classified as built to "empower developers" to make complex spatial information and services accessible to (and useful in) all kinds of applications.

"Cloudant's membership in the OGC reflects the importance of geospatial information to application developers," said Raj Singh, director of interoperability programs for the OGC. "We share Cloudant's vision of integrating geospatial technology and dynamic database queries and look forward to its contributions, both in our consortium and to the open-source community at large."

Cloudant says it is building a high-availability geospatial platform based on its existing core technology, which supports distributed indices and multi-node queries.

"With the explosive rise in sensor data, machine-to-machine communications, and mobile computing, geospatial data processing is extremely important to our customers," said Alan Hoffman, Cloudant cofounder and chief product officer. "We're excited to be working with the OGC to further enhance Cloudant's geospatial capabilities and to ensure future compatibility with developing geo standards. From the very beginning, we designed the Cloudant database service to be highly distributed and location-aware, and our participation in the OGC advances that strategy."