25 August, 2010.  The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announces that Dr. Luis E. Bermudez has been appointed Director of Interoperability Certification for the Consortium. In his new position, Dr. Bermudez will manage the OGC Certification Program, lead plugfest activities, and support OGC testbeds, pilots and interoperability experiments designed to develop, test and validate specifications for geospatial information.

Dr. Bermudez has done pioneering work in geospatial interoperability including ontologies and geospatial metadata frameworks used in environmental observatories. At the Southeastern University Research Association (SURA), he managed the technical implementation of the SURA Coastal Ocean Observing Prediction (SCOOP), supporting improvement of numerical coastal models and the integration of ocean observing systems around the world. He also served as the technical lead of the Marine Metadata Interoperability Project.

Dr. Bermudez's appointment underscores OGC's commitment to providing excellent technology leadership and support to the Consortium's world class geospatial technology and location based Web services consensus standards programs. “Luis has been a valued member of the OGC community,” said George Percivall, OGC's Chief Architect and Executive Director of the Interoperability Program. “We are fortunate to have someone of his caliber on staff to direct the Consortium's certification program.”

Dr. Bermudez has co-authored multiple publications. He has led a major ocean observing system interoperability program and was the technical lead of OGC's Ocean Sciences Interoperability Experiment. He was a member of several OGC standard working groups and an invited expert at the W3C Semantic Sensor Network working group.

Dr. Bermudez has a Ph.D. and M.S. in Hydroinformatics from Drexel University and an M.S. in Industrial Engineering from the Andes University in Bogota, Colombia.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 395 companies, government agencies, research organizations and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. 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/contact.

Editors: See http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/organization/staff for a photo of Luis Bermudez.