[OGC Press Release] OGC Processes Advance GEOSS Interoperability

[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, December 17, 2007 - The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.
(OGC) processes contributed to the interoperability achievements
announced in the "GEOSS Report on Progress 2007" accepted by
the Member Nations of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) at their
EO Summit in Cape Town on 30 November.

At the Summit, representatives of 71 member governments, the European
Commission, and 46 participating organisations of GEO met to assess
progress on the Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS), a
global, coordinated, comprehensive and sustained system of earth
observing systems to provide vast quantities of near-real-time
information of the Earth's land, oceans, atmosphere and biosphere
through interoperability arrangements agreed to among all contributing
systems.

During the EO Summit, ministers of GEO Member Nations were presented
the "GEOSS Report on Progress 2007" and they unanimously
approved the "Cape Town Declaration" reaffirming their
commitment to the development of the GEOSS. The GEOSS Report on
Progress highlighted the news that the development of interoperability
of GEOSS was ahead of schedule.

Development of GEOSS interoperability is led by the GEO Architecture
and Data Committee. As part of this committee, the OGC leads a core
task to develop the GEOSS initial operating capability. The OGC led
the GEOSS Architecture Implementation Pilot, an OGC Interoperability
Initiative, which has brought together technical contributions from
over 120 organizations. Demonstrations of the capability for seven
societal benefit areas can be viewed at:
http://www.ogcnetwork.net/AIPdemos

Ivan DeLoatch, co-chair of the GEOSS Architecture and Data Committee
and the FGDC Staff Director stated, "The OGC processes for
developing interoperable infrastructures serve as an excellent
framework for informing the system of systems approach of GEOSS. The
lessons learned from these processes will provide a basis for the
ongoing architectural developments of GEOSS."

GEOSS Interoperability is based on non-proprietary, formal
international standards. OGC standards were extensively used in the
GEOSS Architecture Implementation Pilot, including the OpenGIS®
Web Map Server (WMS), Web Feature Server (WFS), Web Coverage Server
(WCS) and Catalog Services - Web (CSW) Implementation Specifications.

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/.