September 7, 2000, Wayland, Massachusetts. The Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC) announced today that Sam A. Bacharach joined OGC's staff in March as Interoperability Program Manager. In this role, Mr. Bacharach is responsible for the management of testbeds, demonstrations, prototypes, pilot programs, reference implementations, and technology insertion plans that advance OpenGIS standards for geospatial processing. He is currently managing two testbed projects, Web Mapping Testbed II, and the Geospatial Fusion Testbed. (See http://www.opengeospatial.org for details on these OGC Interoperability Initiatives.)Prior to joining OGC, Mr. Bacharach worked for six years for Intergraph Corporation, first as a military geographic domain expert and then as Business Development Manager, marketing to non-DOD government agencies, including the U.S. Geological Survey. During most of this period he represented Intergraph in OGC's Technical Committee, where he contributed significantly to the development of the OpenGIS Specifications. He also represented Intergraph in OGC's Management Committee.Before he worked for Intergraph, Mr. Bacharach was a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Topographic Officer. His topographic assignments included working as Assistant to the Deputy Director of the Modernization Development Group of the Defense Mapping Agency from 1991 to 1994; Topographic Staff Officer on the Deputy Chief of Staff Engineer staff in Headquarters U.S. Army Europe, Heidelberg, Germany; Operations Officer for the 649th Engineer Battalion, Topographic, in Schwetzingen, Germany; and Commander of the 517th Topographic Engineer Detachment assigned to the V U.S. Corps Headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany. Mr. Bacharach had early army experience as a Military Intelligence Officer in the early 1970s in Germany and then as a Combat Engineer in the early 1980s.Mr. Bacharach holds a Bachelor of Science, Journalism and Master of Science Geography from the University of Idaho, Moscow, ID.– end –“