Wayland, MA, October 18, 2004 – The Open Geospatial Consortium Inc. (OGC) announced a Request For Quotations (RFQ) from technology developers interested in an Interoperability Initiative to develop and deploy a reference implementation of OGC-based services at the state level in the U.S. The OGC Kentucky Landscape Census (KLC) Pilot Project advances OGC Web Services (OWS), the set of OpenGIS® Specifications that comprise the interoperability framework for the emerging “Spatial Web.” The implementation will become the basis for the Commonwealth's land cover theme contribution to the U.S. Geological Survey's National Map.Building on previous work in other OGC initiatives and technical working groups, selected KLC participants will work collaboratively to extend and “ruggedize” existing standards into a robust and complete interoperability framework for implementing multi-vendor enterprise, as well as enterprise-to-enterprise, solutions in government and business.Participants will work in the following areas:– Common Architecture: Develop Geography Markup Language (GML) Application Schemas for selected layers of the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) Framework Data Layers.– Web Services: Deploy a reference implementation composed of OGC(TM) specification components for Web Map Services, Web Feature Services, Web Coverage Services, and Catalog Services.The reference implementation will consist of a statewide network that provides one node at the state level and enables four counties with existing Web services to add open, industry standard access interfaces to them. The remainder of the 116 counties in Kentucky will be developed and added to the network over time.The Request for Quotations can be downloaded from http://www.opengeospatial.org/initiatives/?iid=128 . A Bidder's Conference (a conference call) will be held on October 29, 2004. Questions for the call must be sent to techdesk@opengeospatial.org by 2200 GMT October 27, 2004. The response period begins October 19, 2004 and ends November 18, 2004. The KLC kickoff will take place January 11-14, 2005 and the final demonstration of capabilities will take place in March, 2005. The initiative manager will be Sam Bacharach. For more information on the KLC Initiative, please contact Mr. Bacharach at +1 703-352-3938.The OGC is an international voluntary consensus standards organization of more than 250 companies, government agencies and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geoprocessing interface specifications. OGC's Specifications support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT.”