Wayland, MA, July 31, 2009. The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®), the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) are conducting a Climate Challenge Integration Plugfest (CCIP) to be launched at the FOSS4G (Free, Open Source Software for Geomatics) Conference in Sydney, Australia, 20-23 October, 2009 (http://2009.foss4g.org).

CCIP Participants are invited to deploy services that implement OGC standards, or clients for such services.

The CCIP is a prime opportunity for vendors, users, and other interested parties to mutually refine services, interfaces and protocols in the context of a hands-on engineering experience expected to shape the future of geospatial and imagery-related Web Services software development and Web publication of scientific geospatial data. Participation is encouraged by commercial entities as well as free and open source projects.

Companies or individuals interested in participating should respond to the CCIP Call for Participation at http://external.opengis.org/twiki_public/bin/view/ClimateChallenge2009/CcipCFP by August 10, 2009.

A comprehensive list of presentations has been announced for the international FOSS4G conference. Early Bird registration closes on 7 August, 2009. See details at
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_Press_Release_21 .

The OGC® (http://www.opengeospatial.org/) is an international consortium of more than 385 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OpenGIS® Standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT.

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) (http://osgeo.org) has been created to support and build the highest-quality open source geospatial software. The foundation's goal is to encourage the use and collaborative development of community-led projects, data development and education.