The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) announced that OGC members in the Australia & New Zealand (ANZ) region, with the assistance of the Australian and New Zealand Land Information Council (ANZLIC), recently chartered an Australia & New Zealand (ANZ) Forum to support regional coordination and communication regarding geospatial standardisation activities.

The Forum's industry, government, academic and research organisations will support the OGC's outreach and education efforts regionally. Like the OGC's nine other national and world region organisations, the ANZ Forum will also identify regionally important interoperability requirements and communicate these into the OGC's international standards development and interoperability test bed process.

ANZ Forum members are committed to the use of the open standards defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the members will work with other relevant industry, government and international standards bodies to achieve the OGC's vision.

The ANZ Forum's charter members are:

--  Australian Bureau of Meteorology

--  Australian Bureau of Statistics

--  Australian Department of Defence

--  Australian Ocean Data Centre Joint Facility

--  CSIRO

--  Department of Natural Resources and Mines (QLD)

--  Department of Primary Industries (VIC)

--  Department of Sustainability and Environment (VIC)

--  Geoscience Australia

--  Gosford City Council (NSW)

--  La Trobe University

--  Land and Property Information Division, Department of Finance and Services (NSW)

--  Land Information New Zealand (LINZ)

--  Landcare Research New Zealand Ltd

--  Landgate (WA)

--  Lisasoft Pty Ltd

--  Mercury Project Solutions

--  National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NZ)

--  Office of Spatial Policy (OSP), Department of Resources, Energy & Tourism

--  PSMA Australia Ltd

--  Robert Starling

--  Sparx Systems

--  University of Melbourne

The Forum will be open to all OGC member organisations residing or conducting business in the ANZ region. Non-OGC members are also welcome to participate as observers.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 450 companies, government agencies, research organisations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC(R) Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. 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.