(OGC®) announced that it will hold its next OGC Technical Committee and Planning Committee meetings ( http://www.opengeospatial.org/event/1111tc ) from 28 November - 2 December 2011 at Eurocontrol headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. The meeting is being hosted by Eurocontrol and sponsored by Comsoft, Luciad, and Snowflake Software. "Eurocontrol, the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, is honoured to host the event and we look forward to an even closer coordination with OGC to serve existing and forthcoming aviation information management needs," said Paul Bosman, Manager System Wide Information Management / Enterprise Architecture, Eurocontrol.

The OGC's open standards are widely used to enable communication of digital geographic and location information. The OGC is a consensus-based and member-driven organisation whose members are companies, government ministries and offices, non-governmental organizations, research organisations and universities. Membership in the OGC is growing faster in Europe than in any other region. 202 of the OGC's current 438 members are European.

The public is invited to attend an "Interoperability Day" and special workshops on INSPIRE, the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE), and the Internet of Things. An OGC Nordic Forum will be officially established at the Brussels meeting. The Augmented Reality Markup Language (ARML) 2.0 Standards Working Group will hold its first face to face meeting since it was chartered in September.

Many emerging ICT markets and technologies involve location and sensors, and the value of investments in these areas ultimately depends on a supportive standards infrastructure. The special "Internet of Things" workshop will explore the role of OGC in the broader development of the emerging Internet of Things. The workshop will include IoT presentations by several organizations and discussion of how the IoT will make use of OGC standards for location, sensor webs, 3D spatial models and location-enabled mobile services.

During the meetings, there will be a very full agenda, including presentations and discussions in many of the OGC Domain Working Groups (  http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/wg ). The OGC facilitates more than 50 working groups made up of domain experts from across the world. These working groups provide a forum for discussion of key business and technical issues relating to geospatial information integration and interoperability. The OGC encourages interested parties to consider attending OGC meetings. Non-members may attend as guests with approval by the OGC.

 A limited number of discounted registrations will be provided on a first come basis. The OGC invites inquiries and participation.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 430 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.