[OGC Press Release] OGC Announces Another Membership Category - Aggregate Membership Serves Collaborating Entities

[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, Mass., December 17, 2007 - The Open Geospatial Consortium
(OGC®) announces a new category of membership, Aggregate
Membership. It enables collaborating entities to bring their common
issues and perspectives into the OGC process of developing
interoperability standards. For example, state or provincial and local
government agencies collaborate so that emergency response plans are
fully coordinated. In this process, they identify and address barriers
to interoperability. As an Aggregate Member of OGC, they will be able
to influence standards, and to ensure that the process incorporates
their requirements.

Mark Reichardt, president of OGC, said, "Government entities must
collaborate in order to serve and protect the citizenry, so they are
at the forefront in identifying interoperability issues. This new kind
of membership will enable OGC to benefit from their front-line
experience, and to prioritize its activities to solve these
interoperability issues. The benefit to citizens is that the resulting
open standards become freely available to everyone, so that vendors
know what solutions to provide and can get them to the marketplace
quickly. And the component organizations of an Aggregate Member
themselves get the economic benefits of interoperability faster than
if they work alone."

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 340
companies, government agencies, research organizations, and
universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly
available geospatial standards. OpenGIS® Standards support
interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless
and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower
technology developers to make geospatial information and services
accessible and useful with any application that needs to be
geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at
http://www.opengeospatial.org/.