OGC Interoperability Demo Planned for SPATIAL-TECH 2004.

WAYLAND, Mass. -- The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) (formerly the Open GIS Consortium) announced that OGC members exhibiting at the September 26-29 SPATIAL-TECH 2004 national policy symposium and exhibition will participate in an exhibition floor interoperability demonstration. This demonstration will highlight the standards-based interoperability that must exist between different vendors' software in times of crisis, when rapid communication between federal, state and local government agencies is critical. Companies participating in the exhibition floor interoperability demonstration at SPATIAL-TECH 2004 will include ESRI, Intergraph, IONIC, MapInfo, and others.

OGC's Chairman and CEO, David Schell, and OGC's President, Mark Reichardt, will both speak at the symposium, along with other industry leaders and members of Congress, including U.S. House Armed Services Committee Vice Chair Curt Weldon and U.S. House Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations and the Census Chair, Adam Putnam. SPATIAL-TECH 2004 is the Spatial Technologies Industry Association's (STIA) premiere annual event to advance the interests of the industry and the geospatial community. Visit www.ntpshow.com/spatialtech for more information.

The demonstration and discussions of interoperability among geospatial applications and data sets are an important part of the SPATIAL-TECH program, which was developed by key geospatial players from industry and federal, state, and local government, with input from key members of Congress. Consensus standards make it possible to share geospatial information and technologies, combine data sets that name geographic features in different ways, display data from different data sets using a single set of map symbols, avoid redundant data collection efforts, publish and discover spatial resources on the Web, and perform many other tasks that would be impossible without standards. In addition OGC members are breaking new ground to solve semantic interoperability or geospatial data incompatibility issues that exist across government jurisdictions. OGC standards are an essential ingredient in homeland security as well as for municipal operations, commerce, environmental management, construction of physical infrastructure and many other domains of activity.

The OGC is an international voluntary consensus standards organization of more than 250 companies, government agencies and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geoprocessing interface specifications. OGC's OpenGIS Specifications support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT.