Geopackage

History

GRASS

“”GRASS GIS has been under continuous development since 1982, when the US Army Corps of Engineer's Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (USA/CERL) started exploring the use of GIS for environmental research, monitoring and management of military lands. Since no other software package available back then met all their requirements, they designed and developed their own. GRASS GIS was born under the name of Fort Hood Information System (FHIS). Meanwhile, other US federal agencies and environmental offices became interested and the more general purpose GRASS was born. Several universities adopted GRASS as an important training and research environment and many conducted short-courses for the public, in addition to using GRASS in their own curricula. A large number of US federal agencies, universities, and private companies got also involved in the development during the 90's.

—GRASS Development Team "GRASS GIS history"

Open Geospatial Consortium

“”Its origins are owed to the creation of Geographic Resource and Analysis Support System (GRASS) -- an open source, UNIX-based software developed by the US Army Corps of Engineers. The GRASS community, motivated by the increasing availability of spatial data, grew from 300 users in the mid-eighties to over 6000 by the mid-nineties. This large user group, which included governmental agencies, industry and academia, required effective support which was sought from the private sector. This inspired the formation of a non-profit organisation -- the Open GRASS Foundation (OGF), whose role was to stimulate private sector support for GRASS. Demands for interoperability grew further as a result of government's widespread user of commercial GIS software bringing to light the issue of data sharing and "technical interoperability". GRASS's limitations become more apparent. It had an open data format, but that was not sufficient to enable interoperability with other software packages. In 1992, through financial support from Sun Microsystems, OGF created a project -- Open GIS Application Environment (OGAE), who proposed that multiple product organisations work together to integrate a functionally interoperable geospatial development environment, including raster and vector GISs, a database, and statistical software packages. The concurrent advances of computing in the early 1990s made way for further evolution of the OGAE whose vision, as of 1993, was of diverse geoprocessing systems communicating directly over networks by means of a set of open interfaces and thus, the OGIS (Open Geodata Interoperability Specification) Project was created. Due to OGF being a foundation, organisational changes were required to develop such specifications which necessitated an industry consortium. Therefore, in 1994, OGF was incorporated as "OGIS Ltd." and later in the year changed the name to the "Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc."

— Dominic Taylor and Joseph McGenn "Introduction to OGC Standards - When was the OGC formed?" Landmap Geoknowledge