Wayland, MA, USA, July 19, 2006. At the June meeting of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC(R)) in Edinburgh, Scotland, Simon Cox received OGC's eighth annual Kenneth D. Gardels Award. The Gardels Award, a gold medallion, is awarded to individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to advance OGC's vision of geospatial information fully integrated into the world's information systems.
Simon Cox is Senior Principal Research Scientist , Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Exploration and Mining, Perth, Australia. He has been for many years a highly respected and enormously important contributor in the OGC Technical Committee, where he has made significant contributions to the OpenGIS Geography Markup Language (GML) and Web Feature Service (WFS) Implementation Specifications as well as the Sensor Web Enablement effort. His work in ISO has been of great value in helping OGC standards receive ISO standing, and he has been a strong advocate of OGC in Australia for a decade.
Simon is well known in industry outside of OGC. He developed an application profile of GML for the mining industry, he is an active participant in international geology and Australian standards organizations and he is the author of scores of journal articles, conference papers, reports and abstracts. In 1994 he launched one of the earliest and most successful geoscience websites including web-mapping.
Mark Reichardt, president of OGC, said, “Simon has provided extraordinary service to the OGC in our Technical Committee, in ISO, and in Australia. Few have done more than Simon to help fulfill the OpenGIS dream. We all owe him our greatest thanks.”
The award is given annually in memory of Kenneth Gardels, one of the founding directors of OGC and OGC's former director of academic programs. Mr. Gardels coined the term “Open GIS,” and devoted his life to the humane and democratic uses of geographic information systems. He died in 1999.
The OGC® is an international industry consortium of more than 300 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-based services, and mainstream IT. The specifications empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful with all kinds of applications. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org.
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