OGC Solicits Requests for Quotation in Support of a Military Pilot Project.

Business/Technology Editors

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 8, 2001

The Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC) today released a Request for Quotation that launches a Military Pilot Project (MPP) designed to promote collaborative development and testing of interoperable, Web-based geospatial and intelligence information infrastructures. Sponsored by the US Army Engineering and Development Center (ERDC), this pilot project will draw on technology developers and integrators to demonstrate the power of OGC specifications and interoperable products in support of national, multinational and coalition defense operations.

Vendors selected to participate in the OGC Web Mapping MPP Phase I will apply new interoperable products that contain OGC interfaces to establish a prototype infrastructure that supports intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and geospatial information dissemination and utilization on multinational coalition networks and Advanced Concepts Technology Demonstrations (ACTDs). At the completion of MPP Phase I, these prototypical infrastructures will be used to conduct joint operational demonstrations, to illustrate the benefits of interoperable spatial technologies, and provide feedback into OGC's Specification Development Program.

MPP-Phase 1 will focus on the development, integration and implementation of a prototypical geospatial infrastructure in the Sensitive but Unclassified (SBU) environment. This SBU implementation will provide a set of baseline components and capabilities that will be available as prototypes on the OGC Network. As part of a planned Phase II of the MPP, this prototype environment will be moved to the classified environment for more extensive application on national and coalition networks.

Additional details on the Military Pilot Project and the Phase I Request for Quotation can be found at http://ip.opengis.org/mpp. Proposals will be accepted through February 28, 2001.

Since its founding, OGC has become one of the world's leading software consortia, devoted to the development of interoperability specifications to improve access to and exploitation of spatial or location-based information. OGC's fast-track Interoperability Program, organized to work in conjunction with its consensus-based specifications process, accelerates the development of interoperable infrastructures by means of hands on prototyping. As part of OGC's Interoperability Program, the WMT MPP will benefit from OGC proven practices to deliver results in minimal time.

For additional information, please contact Mr. Jeff Harrison, Interoperability Program Director for OGC, at [phone], or [e-mail].

OGC is an international industry consortium of over 200 companies, government agencies and universities working together to develop commercial specifications to enable the complete integration of spatial data and processing into mainstream computing.