[OGC Press Release] Clemens Portele Receives OGC’s Gardels Award

[OGC Press Release]

PRESS ANNOUNCEMENT FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For information about this announcement, contact:

Sam Bacharach
Executive Director, Outreach and Community Adoption
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-703-352-3938
sbacharach at opengeospatial.org

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Wayland, MA, USA, August 6, 2007. At the July meeting of the Open
Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) in Paris, France, Clemens Portele
received the OGC's ninth annual Kenneth D. Gardels Award. The
Gardels Award, a gold medallion, is awarded to individuals who have
made an outstanding contribution to advance OGC's vision of
geospatial information fully integrated into the world's
information systems.

Clemens Portele of interactive instruments GmbH, Germany, has been an
active participant in the OGC since October 2000. He has contributed
significantly to the success of the OGC's cooperative endeavors
with two other standards organizations, ISO and the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF). He is chair of the INSPIRE
(Infrastructure for Spatial InfoRmation in Europe) Data Specifications
Drafting Team in Europe and he has been a major proponent of
geospatial standards in Germany. He has been an important contributor
in projects with the European Union Satellite Centre and the European
Commission Joint Research Centre, and in Sixth Framework Programme
funded projects like ORCHESTRA (Open Architecture and Spatial Data
Infrastructure for Risk Management).

A main author of the OpenGIS® Geography Markup Language
Specification v3 (GML), Clemens also developed an open source tool for
using and creating GML application schemas that is recognized as key
enabler for broad market uptake of GML.

Mark Reichardt, president of OGC, said, "Clemens Portele truly
deserves this award. He has been a prolific technical contributor in
the OGC's Technical Committee and Interoperability Program, and
without his advocacy OGC would not have come as far as it has in
Europe and in the larger standards world."

The award is given annually in memory of Kenneth Gardels, a founding
director of OGC and OGC's former director of academic programs.
Mr. Gardels coined the term "Open GIS," and devoted his life
to the humane and democratic uses of geographic information systems.
He died in 1999.

The OGC® is an international industry consortium of more than 340
companies, government agencies, research organizations, and
universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly
available interface specifications. OpenGIS® Specifications
support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web,
wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. The
specifications empower technology developers to make complex spatial
information and services accessible and useful with all kinds of
applications. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org.