December 6, 2007 — Wayland, Mass. — The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announces a new category of membership, Individual Membership. It is designed to provide a direct path for independent developers to help shape the OGC agenda. Individual Members have access to all written and electronic Technical Committee (TC) communications, and may participate in working groups and subcommittees of the TC, as well as in OGC Interoperability Initiatives.
Mark Reichardt, president of OGC, said, “OGC recognizes the ever-increasing importance in today's world of independent developers working on a range of technology solutions. OGC now has a mechanism to enable individuals to contribute directly to creation of new standards and modification of existing ones. We look forward to their contributions.”
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.
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