Wayland, MA, USA, August 6, 2007. At the July meeting of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) in Paris, France, Clemens Portele received the OGC's ninth annual Kenneth D. Gardels Award. 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.
Clemens Portele of interactive instruments GmbH, Germany, has been an active participant in the OGC since October 2000. He has contributed significantly to the success of the OGC's cooperative endeavors with two other standards organizations, ISO and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). He is chair of the INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial InfoRmation in Europe) Data Specifications Drafting Team in Europe and he has been a major proponent of geospatial standards in Germany. He has been an important contributor in projects with the European Union Satellite Centre and the European Commission Joint Research Centre, and in Sixth Framework Programme funded projects like ORCHESTRA (Open Architecture and Spatial Data Infrastructure for Risk Management).
A main author of the OpenGIS® Geography Markup Language Specification v3 (GML), Clemens also developed an open source tool for using and creating GML application schemas that is recognized as key enabler for broad market uptake of GML.
Mark Reichardt, president of OGC, said, "Clemens Portele truly deserves this award. He has been a prolific technical contributor in the OGC's Technical Committee and Interoperability Program, and without his advocacy OGC would not have come as far as it has in Europe and in the larger standards world."
The 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 industry consortium of more than 340 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface specifications. OpenGIS® Specifications support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. The specifications empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful with all kinds of applications. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org.
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