-The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announces that it has appointed Denise McKenzie as Executive Director, Marketing and Communications. Working with OGC staff, board, membership and partner organizations, Denise will be responsible for the planning and execution of marketing, communications and education programs to raise awareness and increase application of OGC standards by technology providers and users worldwide. 

Over the past 12 years Denise has worked with all sectors of the geospatial industry on behalf of the State Government of Victoria (Australia) in areas of strategic policy, collaboration and innovation. Her collaborative work has earned local, national and international industry awards. Throughout her career Denise’s focus has been to utilize public-private partnership and community building to move geospatial from being a niche to a core service within mainstream information technology and decision making process. She has worked in a wide variety of domains including emergency, environment, asset and risk management, business intelligence, positioning and navigation. In the past 12 months she has led the formation of the OGC ANZ Forum and has been working with the Australian and New Zealand Land Information Council (ANZLIC) on the ANZ Spatial Marketplace. 


Mark Reichardt commented, "I am delighted that Denise is joining the OGC staff. She brings a tremendous level of energy, experience, enthusiasm and skill to the OGC international team, including an exceptional background in communications and information technology policy. She has a great track record of bringing people together across our industry's private, public, academic and research sectors to achieve common goals. Leading OGC's international marketing and communications program from an office based in the UK, Denise will also boost OGC's presence in Europe, where we currently have staff in Brussels and Bonn." 

Denise McKenzie added, “It is quite exciting to be joining the OGC at a time when the geospatial and location industry is experiencing such an amazing period of growth, innovation and opportunity. I am looking forward to working with the skilled and passionate community of OGC to promote and share the benefits of our standards across the world.”

The OGC is a major international standards consortium of more than 465 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. The consortium has played the lead role since 1994 in making geospatial information – location, GIS, Earth images, routing, etc. – an integral part of the global information infrastructure.  OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT, empowering technology developers to make geospatial information and services useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.