20 November 2013.  The Open Geospatial Consortium and the PODSAssociation, Inc. (“PODS”), havesigned a liaison agreement to provide value for the members of eachorganization. The two organizations have agreed to work together to identify enhancementopportunities between the advanced geospatial interoperability conceptsdeveloped within the OGC's consensus standards process and the PODSAssociation's widely used PODS standard and data model.

Mark Reichardt, president and CEO of the Open GeospatialConsortium, said, “The PODS standard and data model play a very importantrole in the management of pipelines around the world.  I am pleasedto be able to bring together OGC and PODS Association expertise to explore waysin which we can further improve interoperability and integration of pipeline informationwith other important location information.”

Janet Sinclair, Executive Director of the Pipeline Open DataStandard (PODS) Association added, “We recognize the tremendous value and expertisebrought by the OGC, and we look forward to working together to improveinteroperability to support lifecycle data management for pipelines.  Finding better ways to share and exchangepipeline and related information will improve data quality and availabilitysupporting integrity management, regulatory compliance, and the goal of zeropipeline incidents.”

About the PODSAssociation: The PODS Association was created to develop and support open datastorage and interchange standards to meet the specific data management needs ofpipeline companies. Visit the PODS Association website at http://www.pods.org.

About the OGC: The OGCis an international consortium of more than 470 companies, government agencies,research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus processto develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards supportinteroperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless andlocation-based services and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technologydevelopers to make geospatial information and services accessible and usefulwith any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGCwebsite at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.