- The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has appointed both Lew Leinenweber and Bart de Lathouwer to the position of Director, Interoperability Programs. These are key technical positions in the OGC Interoperability Program.

"OGC members will benefit greatly from the leadership that Lew and Bart will bring to OGC Interoperability Program (IP) initiatives," said George Percivall, Chief Architect and Executive Director, OGC Interoperability Program. "Lew brings a wealth of experience from leading prior OGC initiatives, including the fourth OGC Web Services Testbed (OWS-4) and the Geo-Decision Support Services (GeoDSS) activity. As the first member of the OGC IP Staff in Europe, Bart begins what we anticipate will be an exciting and broad-ranging program of OGC projects focused in Europe."

Lew will begin by leading the OGC Climatology-Hydrology Information Sharing Pilot, Phase 1 (CHISP-1) that will advance hydrology services using open standards in an operational, cross-border setting, creating a model for use around the world.  Lew brings exceptional experience with the OASIS Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) and NIEM (National Information Exchange Model). His experience will be a critical asset as the OGC works to advance open geospatial standards in the area of information sharing for intelligence and homeland security applications.  

Bart will lead the OGC element of the COBWEB ("Citizen OBservatory WEB") project recently awarded by the European Commission. COBWEB focuses on crowdsourcing of geospatial environmental information, addressing privacy and security elements.  Bart will also represent OGC in the EO2HEAVEN (Earth Observation and Environmental Modelling for the Mitigation of Health Risks) project and the GEOSS (Global Earth Observation System of Systems) Architecture Implementation Pilot. He leads project development in Europe on many fronts, with particular emphasis on Building Information based on his successful service at Autodesk. This work will support adoption of the OGC CityGML standard for storage and exchange of virtual 3D city models.

About the OGC

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 460 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC 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/contact.