The Open GIS Consortium has announced that OGC President, David Schell has received a CIO Magazine 20/20 Vision award as a “visionary creator/seller of technology.” Mr. Schell will participate with other 20/20 Vision award winners on a panel moderated by Esther Dyson at CIO Magazine’s Perspectives Conference, Oct. 6 – 8 at the Loews Coronado Bay Resort, San Diego, CA.
In 1994, Schell and a group of professionals dedicated to standards and interoperability founded the OGC, a 501 (c)6 not-for-profit membership organization. Bringing together an intensely competitive group of vendors and a diverse group of users, his vision has resulted in a consortium of over 220 members worldwide who have built a remarkable open framework that supports communication involving all types of spatial and temporal information and spatial applications and services. OGC’ s OpenGIS Specifications support interoperability among systems and services for measuring and referencing the Earth and also among geo-processing systems and services such as geographic information systems (GIS), spatially enabled databases, automated mapping and facilities management (AM/FM), digital cartography, navigation, Earth imaging (remote sensing), and Location Based Services (online services for mobile, position-aware networked devices). Due to recent work in OGC, anyone building Web-based information systems can now incorporate standards-based commercial off-the-shelf (or non-commercial) spatial data, services, and components that provide a wide variety of spatial capabilities. This opens the door to integration of spatial capabilities into information systems of all kinds.
