Press release

New Members Join Open GIS Consortium in November and December, 1996

The Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC) announced today that in November and December, 1996, the following organizations became members of the consortium: Microsoft Corporation, Autodesk, Inc., Member.Booz Allen & Hamilton, Inc., Regional Science Institute, LAS (Logiciels et Applications Scientifiques), Inc., Urban Logic, Inc., Pusan National University, and INHA National University/

Wayland, Massachusetts, USA January 2, 1997 – The Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC) announced today that in November and December, 1996, the following organizations became members of the consortium:Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA) joined as a Principal Member of the consortium. Principal Members have a seat on OGC’s Management Committee, which oversees the OGC Technical Committee and plans cooperative industry development programs. Autodesk, Inc., (Sausalito, CA) already a member, increased their level of participation to Principal Member.Booz Allen & Hamilton, Inc. (Vienna, VA), Regional Science Institute (Sapporo, Japan) and LAS (Logiciels et Applications Scientifiques, Inc., Montreal, Quebec, Canada) joined at the Technical Committee level of membership.Urban Logic, Inc. (New York, NY), Pusan National University (Korea), and INHA National University (Korea) joined as associate members.About OGCOGC, an open consortium of more than 85 corporations, government agencies, non-governmental organizations and universities, coordinates development of open geoprocessing software technologies. In OGC, technology providers and technology users collaborate to specify common software interfaces and network services that will integrate all kinds of geographic processing and geographic data to give users unimpeded network-based access to geographic information. Previously, complex and incompatible data formats and non-interoperable geographic processing systems severely limited the use of digital geographic information and the growth of the market for geographic information and geographic processing. OGC’s technology development and market development efforts ensure that geographic information of all kinds will be an important part of the emerging national and global information infrastructures. Current and emerging applications include: automobile navigation with GPS, digital yellow pages that provide directions to a location, on-line “dig-safe” information, delivery tracking, global change research, disaster management, business siting, integrated online information from multiple agencies for urban planning and citizen information, pesticide and fertilizer spreaders that adjust their output based on information products from multispectral Earth observation satellites, and video games that display local “virtual” terrain information from 1-meter resolution Earth observation satellites.See http://www.opengeospatial.org .– end –“