Bentley Joins the Open GIS Consortium as a Principal Member

Salt Lake City, UT, URISA ’96 – July 29, 1996 – The Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (Wayland, MA) today announced that Bentley Systems, Inc. (Exton, PA) has joined the Consortium as a principal member. The Open GIS Consortium (OGC) is a non-profit membership organization dedicated to the development of interoperability standards for the geoprocessing community. As one of three principal members providing geoprocessing software, Bentley will take a lead role in this worldwide effort for transparent sharing of geoprocessing resources.Bentley’s participation will focus on GeoEngineering, the expanding market of unified engineering and planning. The company will help OGC establish geoprocessing standards and support those standards in MicroStation GeoGraphics(TM), its integrated computer-aided design (CAD) and GIS product. The high volume of users that have purchased MicroStation GeoGraphics already in its first five months as well as the growing number of third-party developers will enjoy considerable benefits from this interoperability.David Schell, president of OGC, comments, “We are impressed with Bentley’s forward-looking approach to the geoprocessing market. They have a track record of excellent software and a commitment to the development of open systems enterprise solutions. They are a fast growing product company committed to the development of the OpenGIS(TM) Specification and to Consortium efforts to unify and develop the open system market for geoprocessing.”Jean-Baptiste Monnier, Bentley vice president of GeoEngineering, notes, “The Open GIS Consortium is immensely important to our users. Our government and commercial users tell us that the most expensive aspect of GIS is data creation. The Consortium’s work will assure users that data will be preserved and leveraged across tools and organizations. This issue grows asymptotically as GIS taps the Internet, which is happening today.”OGC is creating the OpenGIS Specification (OGIS), a conceptual framework and set of software specifications for writing software interfaces that enable transparent access to distributed geodata and geoprocessing resources. Previously, incompatible data formats and data structures prevented interoperability and limited the use of geographic information and technology.Bentley’s representative on OGC’s Management Committee will be Michael Fisher, the sector executive for GIS and mapping. OGC involves both developers and users of GIS in its standardization efforts. Over 60 vendors, integrators, universities, government agencies, and other standards organizations are represented in the Consortium. Principal members are Lockheed Martin, Sun Microsystems, Intergraph Corp., IBM, U.S. Geological Survey, Mitsubishi Corp., Sedona GeoServices, Oracle Corp., Apple Computer Inc., USDAC (Universal Spatial Data Access Consortium), and now Bentley.For more information on OGC, please contact Lance McKee at 508/655-5858 (US). For more information on Bentley, please contact Bentley at 610/458-5000 (US).– end –“