OGC Appoints European Business Development Director

Bonn, Germany, 6 October 2006. The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) announced that it has acquired the services of Ms. Athina Trakas to manage its European business development activities. Ms. Trakas will work on behalf of the Consortium to further expand European involvement in OGC programs, and to enhance the Consortium's capacity to address regional interoperability requirements. Ms. Trakas appointment was formalized through a business agreement between the OGC and the Consulting Center for Geographic Information (CCGIS).Ms Trakas brings to her new task a long experience with OGC technology. From CCGIS' founding in 1998 she served in various business development roles working with European clients to promote adoption of OGC standards, more recently extending her work to support the adoption of OGC standards throughout the global Open Sourcecommunity.Mark Reichardt, the OGC's president, said, “We are extremely fortunate to have Athina supporting OGC European objectives. She has excellent business development skills, she's multilingual, and she understands and believes in the benefits of open standards. Through her work with CCGIS, she has shown consistently that she can effectively convey the OGC message to both government and private sector organizations.”In her OGC role, Ms. Trakas will conduct business in Europe on behalf of the OGC's mission, goals and objectives, with a focus on market education, membership recruitment and consultancy services. Ms. Trakas will work closely with the Consortium's European Forum, a group open to all European members of the OGC. The Forum serves to coordinate outreach in the region as well as input into the OGC's international consensus process. She will also support OGC European interoperability services projects administered by OGC Europe, Ltd.The OGC® is an international industry consortium of more than 320 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 services, and mainstream IT. They empower developers to make complex spatial information and services useful with all kinds of applications. See http://www.opengeospatial.org.”