OGC Press Releases

Wayland, MA, USA, December 17, 1998: Deutsche PhoneSat, a German telecommunications and flight control, remote sensing and GIS company, has become a Principal Member in the Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC), the international standards organization dedicated to interoperable geoprocessing. As a Principal Member, Deutsche PhoneSat will have a seat on OGC's Management Committee and will help shape the consortium's business plan and its OpenGIS(R) Specification plan and schedule. Participation in OGC will help Deutsche PhoneSat play a role in integrating geographic information and analysis into enterprise information systems and into network-resident spatial information services for a variety of consumer products. David Schell, president of OGC, said, "Deutsche PhoneSat has a vision and a strategy that fit perfectly with OGC's view of how the industry is changing. They help define the synergies between telecommunications, control, and geospatial capabilities. For example, in the next few years we will see car computers, phones, and other Internet devices that know their location. This will open up huge new e-commerce potentials, but the breakthrough will depend on telcos that understand network-resident spatial services." All telecommunications and telematic companies use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to manage their widely distributed facilities and customer operations, but Deutsche PhoneSat delivers earth imaging, photogrammetry and GIS services to customers in addition to using these services in support of its own operations. Deutsche PhoneSat has an excellent track record in delivering complex high technology systems such as air traffic control and satellite-based public and private communications networks. Through its licensed national telephone network operations in Eastern and Western countries, its work with NATO standards, and its multi-partner integration projects, Deutsche PhoneSat has gained considerable knowledge about interoperability, which is OGC's area of concern. Deutsche PhoneSat delivered to EUROCONTROL, for example, the first phase - the Black Sea region - of "Route South", a project to unite and modernize the main flight routes and diverse national air traffic systems along the important flight corridor from Southeast Europe through Southwest Asia and into South Asia. Deutsche PhoneSat joins GTE Internetworking, Byers Engineering, Bell South and other companies in OGC's Telecom Special Interest Group (SIG) who have a keen interest in ensuring that the OpenGIS Specifications result in open software interfaces and common layered software services that meet all the requirements of the telecommunications industry. Deutsche PhoneSat is an innovative high tech company in the field of applied telecommunications and GIS technologies with customers and operations in Germany, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet republics, Asia, and the Americas. The company offers a wide range of systems and services involving satellite communications, earth imaging, navigation, air traffic control, geospatial analysis, and multimodal voice, video and data communications systems. The Open GIS Consortium is a not-for-profit industry consortium dedicated to the widespread use of interoperable geoprocessing throughout the world's information infrastructures. -- end --

October 27, 1998, Wayland, MA. The Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC) issued a request for technology (RFT) for an OGC Interoperability Initiative called the Web Mapping Technology Testbed. Sponsored by the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC), the US Army Topographic Engineering Center (TEC) and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), the testbed is intended to advance Web mapping technology, support development of a multi-vendor portable demonstration, and feed requirements into OGC's OpenGIS Specification process. Participating vendors will gain ideas for product and integration strategies as well as contact with potential partners and customers. Funding will be available to support the project after RFT submissions have been evaluated and specific testbed objectives have been defined. The rapidly evolving World Wide Web provides unprecedented on-line access to information and services. Web-based Mapping Technology describes technology and architectures to provide users with on-line, distributed access to geospatial information, geographic analysis, and terrain visualization applications using a web-based client and internet/intranet access and protocols. Testbed sponsors seek interoperable, web-based access to distributed geographic information, the ability to rapidly construct sophisticated end-user applications on demand, and tools to transmit geographic information directly to the user desktop. The RFT can be downloaded from http://www.opengeospatial.org/wwwmap/index.htm Submissions are due December 2, 1998. -- end --

Wayland, MA, USA, August 31, 1998: The Telecommunications Special Interest Group (Telco SIG) of the Open GIS Consortium (OGC) Technical Committee issued a Request for Information (RFI) which is critical to the future use of geospatial information in telecommunications organizations. OGC seeks responses from Outside Plant Engineers, Inside Plant Engineers, Planners, Forecasters, Inspectors, Cartographers, Accountants, Locators, Database Administrators, and people working in Purchasing, Customer Service, Construction, Material Management, Marketing, Install and Repair, Operations, IT/IS, and Management who have experience with spatial data flows within and across functional areas of telcos. OGC, a 147 member international consortium, is developing the OpenGIS Specification for standard software interfaces. Diverse GIS, AM/FM, earth imaging, and navigation systems with OpenGIS Specification conformant interfaces will be able to communicate directly in terms of earth coordinates, geometry, geographic feature attributes, etc. In addition to providing interoperability between geoprocessing systems from different vendors, the OpenGIS Specification will ultimately enable componentization of geoprocessing software and the integration of functions such as thematic map overlays, proximity analysis, and other spatial operations into information systems of all kinds. An RFI solicits information from an industry to help guide the OGC Technical Committee in defining interfaces and services to support that industry. Responses to the Telco RFI's questions about metadata, requirements, architectural framework, and interfaces will be used by the Telco SIG to extend and detail the OpenGIS architecture on behalf of the telecom industry, on a schedule that reflects the industry's priorities. The Telco SIG's mission is to ensure that the OpenGIS Specification results in interoperable geospatial products which meet the needs of the telecommunications industry. Telcos rely heavily on GIS and AM/FM software because their facilities and customers are widely distributed geographically. Telco operations will benefit in many ways from geoprocessing interoperability: Different operating units with different kinds of geoprocessing software will be able to share data easily, often over the Internet. Software will be selected on the basis of application suitability rather than consistency with a proprietary legacy system. Merged Telcos will work together more smoothly because the merged companies' geoprocessing systems will work together. Administrative workers will be able to take advantage of data collected by and for field operations. Customers' geodata accesses over the Internet will produce revenue for Telcos. And OpenGIS Specification conformant interfaces will make it much easier to provide new online geospatial services, such as multimedia yellow pages that can tell a customer how to reach a destination. Tom Strickland of Byers Engineering is the chair of the Telco SIG, in which many of the telecommunications industry's geoprocessing software vendors are represented. GTE Internetworking, a Principal Member of OGC, and other telcos also participate in the SIG. The OGC Telecommunications RFI is available at http://www.opengeospatial.org. Responses to the RFI are due by January 18, 1999. -- end --

Wayland, Massachusetts, USA March 31, 1998 - The Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC) announced today that Ordnance Survey, the National Mapping Agency of Great Britain, has joined OGC as a Technical Committee member. Ordnance Survey is the first major non-US government agency to join OGC. Though a public-sector organization, Ordnance Survey is an £80 million-a-year business which recovers more than 90% of its costs by selling products and services or licensing others to use its copyrighted material. Ordnance Survey's strategic planning process includes ongoing analysis of the ways in which technology is remolding the business environment, opening up opportunities to offer new products and services. Bryan Nanson, Director of Information Management, said that, "Faced with the requirement to re-engineer what is already probably the most sophisicated geospatial data capture and customer supply system in the world, Ordnance Survey anticipates that Membership in OGC will help us to influence and anticipate software interface and component product design. This will help minimise the risk that geoprocessing software vendors' new products will fail to meet our requirements. It will also ensure that we take full advantage of geospatially related developments which are based on the most effective mainstream and emerging Information Technology." Lance McKee, OGC's Vice President, Corporate Communications, said, "National mapping agencies face significant challenges because the technologies underlying their operations and the operations of their government and private sector customers are evolving very rapidly. OGC provides a forum for both understanding and influencing the technology that is moving geoprocessing into mainstream information systems." About Ordnance Survey Ordnance Survey employs around 1850 people in their headquarters in Southampton and in 81 offices across Britain. Ordnance Survey uses more than 1000 desktop computers in its work and 40 gigabytes of information flow between them every day, traveling a long 20 kilometres of fibre-optic cable and 300 kilometres of wiring in its headquarters building alone. Ordnance Survey has created and maintains by far the most detailed mapping of Britain. The National Topographic Database (NTD) is now the "master map of Britain", recording on computer more than 200 million individual features of the British landscape. It features items as small as telephone boxes and private garages surveyed at scales of up to 1:1250 (80 cm to 1 kilometre or about 50 inches to 1 mile), a scale which shows the detailed shapes of individual buildings. The NTD is effectively a seamless electronic map of the whole country which has replaced the need to maintain around 230,000 individual large-scale paper maps. New information is added to the NTD daily and detailed information from it can be accessed instantly through a growing network of agents around Britain as hard-copy print-outs or as data on floppy disk. The NTD is also the prime source of information used to create a wide range of Ordnance Survey products at many scales, from paper maps to digital datasets. Computer technology is also underpinning the development of a National Geospatial Data Framework (NGDF), in which Ordnance Survey is one of the key players. The aim is to create a framework which will allow the integration and combined use of much mor e information collected by a wide range of bodies. In addition to developing its databases, pursuing a wide-ranging research program and launching new products, Ordnance Survey is increasingly offering services to tailor its products to the requirements of individual customers - a trend initiated by th e 'print-on-demand' Superplan mapping. Offering solutions to specific problems goes well beyond Ordnance Survey's traditional offerings, for the digital revolution has transformed what is possible, what customers want, and the very nature of a national mapping agency. About OGC OGC is a not-for-profit industry organization dedicated to organising cooperative technology development that enables interoperability between diverse geoprocessing systems and improved access to geographic information and geoprocessing services for users. In addition to developing the OpenGIS Specification in the OGC Technical Committee, OGC works to inform the geoprocessing community about open geoprocessing and promotes a vision of full integration of geospatial data and geoprocessing resources into mainstream computing and the widespread use of interoperable, commercial geoprocessing software throughout the global information infrastructure. OGC currently has 120 members, about one-half from countries other than the US. Members include geoprocessing software vendors, such as Autodesk, Bentley Systems, Cadcorp, Intergraph, Laser-Scan, MapInfo, Smallworldwide, and Sedona Geoservices, and IT industry leaders including GTE Internetworking, Intergraph, Microsoft, Mitsubishi, Oracle, Sun and Siemens Nixdorf. UK's Ordnance Survey joins a group of US federal agencies in OGC, including the US Geological Survey National Mapping Division, Department of Defense National Imagery and Mapping Agency, NASA National Space Science Data Center, and the Department of Agriculture National Resources Conservation Service. -- end --

Wayland, Massachusetts, USA, February 27, 1998 - The Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC) announced today that two important new Requests For Proposals (RFPs) were approved February 12, 1998 by the OGC Technical Committee and OGC Management Committee at meetings of the committees in Munich, Germany. 110 attendees representing 66 organizations and 14 countries were present. These most recent OGC bimonthly meetings were hosted by Siemens Nixdorf Informationssystemes (SNI) (Munich, Germany), a Principal Member of OGC. The RFPs, which will be posted on OGC's public website (http://www.opengeospatial.org) early in March, request the submission of proposed detailed engineering specifications for software interfaces which implement recently completed parts of OGC's OpenGIS Abstract Specification. Interfaces that conform to OpenGIS Implementation Specifications resulting from such submissions will enable diverse geoprocessing software systems to communicate directly, which will enable complex geospatial information to become an integral part of modern network-based information systems. One of the two recent RFPs is called the Grid Coverages RFP. It goes the next step beyond the first OpenGIS Implementation Specifications for Simple Features. The previously released Simple Features Implementation Specifications provide standard methods for systems to communicate simple geometry, spatial reference system, and attribute information. OpenGIS Grid Coverages Implementation Specifications will provide standard methods for systems to create and share additional types of geospatial information. New categories of information introduced include elevation matrices, raster structures, digital images, and other structures using a grid of points with attached values as their foundation. (OGC coverages are similar to objects commonly called "fields" in college GIS courses.) Important coverage categories addressed by this RFP include satellite images, scanned maps, digital elevation models, and computer map displays. Consensus interfaces on these objects will enable diverse systems to interoperate in performing tasks such as merging, interpolation, resampling, evaluation, and map algebra analysis. The other RFP approved for release last week is the Catalog RFP. OpenGIS Implementation Specifications for Catalogs will provide standard methods for publishing and discovering information about network-resident geodata. OpenGIS Implementation Specifications for Catalogs create a foundation, for example, for interoperable geospatial "search engines" which will provide information about network-resident geodata resources, just as Web search engines provide information about html-formatted text and simple images. Queries to geospatial catalogs might typically consist of a specified place name, area or point location and a specified information theme, such as roads, hotels, or population density. The information returned would consist of a list of geodata servers that contain the specified information, together with metadata that will help the user to select the most appropriate sources. Both RFPs ask for implementation specifications that will enable developers to build interfaces for software running on any of the common distributed computing platforms (DCPs), such as OLE/COM and CORBA. Different DCPs require slightly different specifications, but OGC is designing the specification to provide as much interoperability between DCPs as possible. Submitters are expected to be teams of geospatial software vendors, database software vendors, and others who can contribute to the necessary technology and supporting infrastructure needed to implement the vision of the OpenGIS Abstract Specification. The meetings in Munich were attended by many Europeans responding to OGC's appeal for European participation. On Friday, there was a well-attended OGC and ISO TC/211 ad hoc technical working session. Significant progress was made at this session by reviewing each work item of ISO TC/211, and establishing action items and responsibilities that will help bring the two organizations' specifications into alignment. The Open GIS Consortium is an international organization of 118 members engaged in a cooperative effort to create open computing specifications in the area of geoprocessing. OGC envisions the full integration of geospatial data and geoprocessing resources into mainstream computing and the widespread use of interoperable, commercial geoprocessing software throughout the information infrastructure. -- end --

Wayland, Massachusetts, USA, February 27, 1998 - The Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC) announced today two important milestones in the development of its OpenGIS Specification, a specification for software interfaces that will give computer users easy access to complex geospatial data and geographic information processing capabilities. On February 12, 1998, in meetings hosted in Munich, Germany by Siemens Nixdorf Informationssystemes (SNI), an OGC Principal Member, OGC's Technical Committee and Management Committee approved two Requests For Proposals (RFPs). The RFPs request the submission of proposed detailed engineering specifications for software interfaces which implement recently completed parts of OGC's OpenGIS Abstract Specification. One of the RFPs is called the Grid Coverages RFP, which goes the next step beyond the first OpenGIS Implementation Specifications for Simple Features. The previously completed Simple Features Implementation Specifications provide standard methods for systems to communicate simple geometry, spatial reference system, and attribute information. OpenGIS Grid Coverages. Implementation Specifications will provide standard methods for systems to share additional types of geospatial information, such as satellite images, scanned maps, digital elevation models, and computer map displays. Conformant interfaces will enable diverse systems to interoperate in performing tasks such as merging, interpolation, resampling, evaluation, and map algebra analysis. The other RFP approved recently is the Catalog RFP. OpenGIS Implementation Specifications for Catalogs will provide standard methods for publishing and discovering information about network-resident geodata. Conformant interfaces will be used, for example, in interoperable "geospatial search engines", for which queries might typically consist of a specified place name, area or point location and a specified information theme, such as roads, hotels, or population density. The information returned would consist of a list of geodata servers that contain the desired information, together with metadata that will help the user select the most appropriate sources. The Open GIS Consortium is an international organization of 118 members engaged in a cooperative effort to create open computing specifications in the area of geoprocessing. OGC envisions the full integration of geospatial data and geoprocessing resources into mainstream computing and the widespread use of interoperable, commercial geoprocessing software throughout the information infrastructure. See http://www.opengeospatial.org . -- end --

Wayland, MA USA, September 5, 1997 - The Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC) announced today that its recently announced OpenGIS Simple Features Specifications are now available to the public at http://www.opengeospatial.org. Strong demand for early access to the specifications prompted OGC to make them available during the final editing period. The OGC Technical Committee will make minor revisions during the next two months, leading to release of the Revision 1.0 specifications early in November. The three OpenGIS Simple Feature specifications enable programmers to write application software using interfaces that give applications open access to heterogeneous geographic data sources on three distributed computing platforms: Microsoft's OLE/COM, the Object Management Group's CORBA, and SQL. The specifications were reviewed, demonstrated and approved at OGC's August 11-14 Technical Committee and Management Committee meetings at Cambridge University, Cambridge, England. OGC, an international consortium of more than 100 corporations, agencies and universities, coordinates collaborative development of the OpenGIS Specification and collaborative business development to support full integration of geospatial data and geoprocessing resources into mainstream computing. See http://www.opengeospatial.org/info/techno/specs.htm. -- end --

Cambridge, UK, August 14, 1997 - This week, for the first time ever, members of the Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC) demonstrated the newly developed OpenGIS interfaces which are designed to enable interoperability among heterogeneous Geographic Informa tion Systems. This first release of OpenGIS interfaces (OGC Request Number 1: OpenGIS Simple Features) was the result of an extraordinary collaborative effort among members, many of whom normally compete with each other. Working together to respond to the requirements defined by the OGCs "OpenGIS Abstract Specification: An Object Model for Interoperable Geoprocessing", these organizations developed and submitted implementation specifications designed to enable open acc ess to diverse geographic data sources on three distributed computing platforms, including Microsoft's OLE/COM, the Object Management Group's CORBA, and SQL (via the ODBC application programming interface). These implementation specifications were reviewe d, demonstrated and approved at OGC's August 11-14 Technical Committee and Management Committee meetings at Cambridge University's Magdalene College in Cambridge, England - hosted by GIS vendors Laser-Scan, Ltd. (Cambridge, UK) and Smallworldwide plc. (Cambridge, UK). Kurt Buehler, OGCs vice president and chief technology officer, said, "The world owes a considerable debt to the participation of normally competing GIS vendors who provided much of the technical expertise and support necessary to prepare and submit these RFP responses and demos. The collaborative development of these specifications has set a remarkable precedent th at has changed the way the geoprocessing community works and has set the stage for the full integration of geoprocessing into mainstream Information Technology." Soon to be made available on OGCs Web site to all interested developers, OGCs three OpenGIS Simple Feature software specifications, one each for OLE/COM, CORBA, and SQL, describe interfaces that enable transparent access to geographic data held in hete rogeneous processing systems on distributed computing platforms. Since August, 1994, the OGC committees have met to solve technical and market problems that have restricted the sharing of digital geographic data. The OpenGIS Simple Features Specifications are the first in a series of interface and services specifica tions that OGC is developing to make sophisticated geoprocessing capabilities and diverse kinds of geographic information directly accessible to all categories of computer users. This has important implications for industries such as telecommunications, u tilities, environment, government, defense, insurance, real estate, and transportation which depend on geographic information, and also for non-technical users of information systems of all kinds. The open interface specifications approved this week address "simple features," referring to software expressions of geographic features, including "simple geometry" (that is, points, lines, polygons, and combinations of these), spatial referencing (su ch as Mercator projection and Longitude/Latitude), and attributes (such as type of road or zoning designation). Soon, vendors will deliver OpenGIS Simple Features conformant server products which will service other vendors' client products' requests for s electing geographic features using such operations as intersect, union, subtract, spatial buffer, and select by attribute, and location. Each of the OpenGIS Simple Features submissions were the result of an extraordinary effort among normally competing vendors, requiring their participation in numerous meetings to merge ideas and efforts into each of the three respective submissions. The OpenGIS Simple Features submission for Microsoft's OLE/COM or DCOM platform was the result of a joint submission by Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) (Redlands, CA), Intergraph Corporation (Huntsville, AL), Laser-Scan, Inc. (Sterling, VA), MapInfo Corporation (Troy, NY), Smallworld Systems, Inc., Vision International of Autometric (Alexandria, VA), and Camber Corporation (Huntsville, AL), with technical support from Informix Software, Inc. (San Diego, CA), Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA), and Oracle Corporation (Redwood Shores, CA). The OpenGIS Simple Features submission for the Object Management Group's CORBA platform was the result of a joint submission by Bentley Systems, Inc. (Exton, PA), ESRI, Genasys II, Inc. (Ft. Collins, CO), Oracle Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Pal o Alto, CA), and the University of California Los Angeles Data Mining Laboratory, with technical support from Netscape Communications Corporation (Mountain View, CA). The OpenGIS Simple Features submission for SQL (via the ODBC application programming interface) was the result of a joint submission by ESRI, IBM Corporation (Poughkeepsie, NY), Informix Software, Inc., MapInfo Corporation, and Oracle Corporation. By addressing these three distributed computing platforms (DCPs), OGC has made its first specification applicable in most mainstream computing scenarios. OLE/COM is the most widely used desktop computing environment, and it has extensions for distribut ed computing which address a number of distributed computing requirements. CORBA (which is being created in an open process by another consortium, the Object Management Group) offers a completely network-centered and object-based architecture for distribu ted computing over enterprise networks and the Internet. SQL is not, by itself, a distributed computing environment, but it is compatible with OLE/COM and CORBA. The leading database vendors have already delivered versions of relational database systems t hat can store complex geographic data. The OpenGIS Simple Features Specification for SQL makes it possible to create open interfaces on these servers which will make the data accessible to client applications that understand these interfaces. OGC, an international consortium of more than 100 corporations, government agencies, and universities, coordinates collaborative development of the OpenGIS Specification and collaborative business development efforts to support the full integration of geospatial data and geoprocessing resources into mainstream computing. See http://www.opengeospatial.org . -- end --

Wayland, Massachusetts, USA, April 15, 1997 - The Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC), the organization that coordinates collaborative development of the OpenGIS Specification for interoperable geoprocessing, announced today that Dr. Robert W. Corell of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Martin C. Faga of the MITRE Corporation (McLean, VA), have become members of OGC's Board of Directors. Dr. Corell is chair of the interagency committee that developed and now coordinates the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Prior to his appointment as Assistant Director for Geosciences at NSF in 1987, he served in leadership roles in various international, national and regional organizations, including the Vice Chair of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory Systems (UNOLS), Chair of the NSF Ocean Sciences Division Advisory Committee for many years, Chairman of the Marine Sciences Council for the State of New Hampshire, and Chair/President of several national oceanography societies and organizations. Currently, he serves in leadership roles in many other national and international research organizations in the geosciences and related fields. Dr. Corell has served as Chairman of the Subcommittee on Global Change Research of the NSTC Committee on Environmental and Natural Resources since 1987, and he directed the 1990 White House Conference on Science and Economics Research Related to Global Change. Prior to his work at NSF, he was a professor and director of several programs at the University of New Hampshire. Dr. Corell graduated from Case Institute of Technology (BSME, 1956; Ph.D., 1964) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.S.M.E., 1959). Commenting on his interest in OGC, Dr. Corell said, "OGC represents a critical and timely partnership among industry, government, and academe essential to serving a broad range of users' needs for geospatial data and information systems. I am delighted with the opportunity to serve on the Board and to share the the interests and perspectives of the research communities concerned with understanding the complex and interdependent systems of planet Earth: from the earth sciences to oceanography and from the atmospheric and meteorological sciences to polar research. OGC a provides unique and extraordinarily effective venue to provide the interoperability and standards methodologies, research, and education for GIS systems of the twenty-first century." Martin Faga is Senior Vice President and General Manager, Center for Integrated Intelligence Systems at The MITRE Corporation in McLean, Virginia. The Center serves Department of Defense and Intelligence Community Sponsors in the integration of intelligence systems from sensor through presentation to the ultimate user. Prior to joining MITRE, Mr. Faga served from 1989 until 1993 as Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space, responsible for overall supervision of Air Force space matters. At the same time, he served as Director of the National Reconnaissance Office, responsible to the Secretary of Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence for the development, acquisition, and operation of all U.S. satellite reconnaissance programs. Other facets of Mr. Faga's career include service as a professional staff member for the Select Committee on Intelligence of the House of Representatives where he was a member and later head of the program and budget staff. He received bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering in 1963 and 1964 from Lehigh University. Mr. Faga stated that, "My interests and those of MITRE are closely aligned with those of OGC. MITRE participates in standards consortia because we are committed to open systems and the use of commercial equipment in systems for government use whenever possible. OGC addresses interoperability among GIS systems and integration of GIS into the general information infrastructure, which are very important issues for us." About OGC OGC coordinates development of the OpenGIS Specification and also organizes related business development and institutional adoption of open systems approaches to the collection, management, distribution, and processing of digital geographic information. See http://www.opengeospatial.org . -- end --

Wayland, Massachusetts, USA April 8, 1997 - The Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC) announced today that six organizations became members in February and March of 1997, bringing OGC's total membership to 94. OGC coordinates development of the OpenGIS Specification for common interfaces and services that support access to diverse geographic data and geoprocessing resources in networked computing environments. Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) (Mountain View, CA) and the U.S. Army Topographic Engineering Center (TEC) joined at the Technical Committee level, which gives them voting privileges in the OGC Technical Committee. SGI, maker of high performance graphics workstations and servers, has many customers involved in applications such as geographic information systems (GIS), Earth imaging, and distributed interactive simulation. OGC membership will help SGI keep their products synchronized with the open systems initiative which bears most directly on the ability of these customers' clients and servers to access and provide heterogeneous geodata and geoprocessing resources over networks. TEC is the Army's center for research and development of a wide range of topographic techniques and equipment needed to support Army field operations. TEC works closely with the Department of Defense National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) in: managing and coordinating the Army's requirements for digital topographic data (DTD); developing and evaluating prototype DTD products; and developing product and software standards. Membership in OGC provides TEC with direct access to a standards effort important to the Department of Defense and a group of partner intelligence agencies who created the NIMA-led Geospatial Information Integrated Product Team (GI IPT) to make strategic decisions relating to these agencies' production, management, and use of geospatial data. Last year, the GI IPT joined OGC as a Strategic Member to enlist the consortium's help in this planning effort. The Agricultural University of Norway and Warsaw University, now university associate members, join 18 other European universities and research centers who are beginning to play an important role in the development of the OpenGIS Specification. The associate membership of GIS/Trans, Ltd., (Cambridge, MA), a systems and integration house with many important transportation contracts in government and industry, indicates the growing importance of open systems approaches in the transportation sector of geoprocessing. OPEN INTELLECT (Atlanta, GA), also joining at the associate member level, sees education as the most critical element in this early phase of building advanced, interoperable geospatial computing capabilities and institutional consensus. OPEN INTELLECT's Atlanta Metropolitan Forum for Open Spatial Information Systems supports the efforts of both OGC and the Federal Geographic Data Committee. OGC coordinates development of the OpenGIS Specification and also facilitates related business development and institutional adoption of open systems approaches to the collection, management, distribution, and processing of digital geographic information. -- end --