The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) and the OpenMI Association announced that they recently signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to cooperate in standards development and promotion of open standards related to computer modelling. A first priority will be the facilitation of OpenMI 2.0 as an open international consensus standard under the OGC process framework.

The objectives of the OpenMI Association are to promote the development, use, management and maintenance of the Open Modelling Interface (the OpenMI), a standard for the exchange of data between computer software in environmental management applications. Learn more about the OpenMI Association at   http://www.openmi.org.

Roger Moore, chairman of the OpenMI Association, said, “The OpenMI Association sees huge opportunities ahead if the linking of models of different processes as they run can be made simple and reliable. Our immediate goal is to facilitate the integrated modelling needed to understand Earth system processes and hence help scientists, policy makers and managers find sustainable solutions to environmental challenges. Our long term aim is to unlock the innovation that will create a new global wealth generating industry.”

“The first step in realising these opportunities,” Moore explained, “has been to devise a generic interface that allows data exchange between independently developed models representing any process, based on any concept, running on any platform and developed by any supplier. OpenMI Version 2.0 now meets many of these goals. It is stable and operational. The OpenMI Association is therefore looking forward to the next step, which is working with the OGC to publish the OpenMI as an adopted OGC standard. In doing so, the OpenMI Association seeks to make the OpenMI standard available and accessible to the worldwide modelling community.”

"Given the pervasive nature of location in issues related to environment and earth system processes, the OGC has been working closely with the international community to advance standards that make it easier to share critically important environmental information and apply it to important education, research and decision making activities," said Mark Reichardt, President and CEO of the OGC.

“Progress toward a sustainable future depends on our improved understanding of these complex systems and our collective ability to act from the local to global levels. This partnership with OpenMI enables our organizations to work more closely to assure that open standards-based modeling capabilities can be seamlessly and rapidly integrated into processing environments. This will improve our collective understanding and ability to respond to environmental challenges."

The agreement between the OGC and the OpenMI Association exemplifies the trend among global standards organizations to form partnerships that make their standards more useful and useful to larger populations of users.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 415 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, sensors 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 OGCwebsite at  http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.