Wayland, MA, USA, 19 October 2011. At the September meeting of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC(R)) in Boulder, Colorado, Josh Lieberman received the OGC's prestigious 12th annual Kenneth D. Gardels Award (http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/awards). The Gardels Award, a gold medallion, is awarded to individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to advance OGC's vision of geospatial information fully integrated into the world's information systems.

Josh Lieberman is a Senior Manager in the Geospatial Analytics team within the Federal Analytic and Forensic Technology group of Deloitte Financial Advisory Services LLP. He first became active in OGC Technical Committee and Interoperability Program activities more than a decade ago and he has been a participant as well as an IP architect in numerous OGC pilot projects, interoperability experiments and testbeds. He has served most recently as an architect in the GEOSS (Global Earth Observation System of Systems) Architecture Implementation Pilot (AIP).

As a founder and co-chair of the OGC Geosemantics Domain Working Group (DWG), Josh has worked effectively to promote the importance of geospatial semantics within the OGC membership as well as throughout the larger Semantic Web Community.  As a result of his leadership, this working group has made a significant contribution to the creation of a framework for practical geosemantic applications in the context of OGC Web services and other specifications. Josh also currently co-chairs the Technical Committee REST Subcommittee, and was elected by the membership to serve on the OGC Architecture Board. 

On behalf of the of OGC Board of Directors, David Schell, chairman of the Board, said, “Josh Lieberman has been a guiding influence and a brilliant contributor in the consortium. He has consistently exemplified the organization's founding spirit of innovation, strategic vision and personal integrity, and his clear-sighted understanding of the potentials inherent in geospatial semantics provide an example of the excellence to which we as a community aspire.” 

The Gardels Award is given annually in memory of Kenneth Gardels, a founding director of OGC and OGC's former director of academic programs. Mr. Gardels coined the term “Open GIS,” and devoted his life to the humane and democratic uses of geographic information systems. He died in 1999.

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.

As used in this document, “Deloitte” means Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries.