21 August 2012 – The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has appointed both Lew Leinenweber and Bart de Lathouwer to the position of Director, Interoperability Programs. These are keytechnical positions in the OGC Interoperability Program.

“OGC memberswill benefit greatly from the leadership that Lew and Bart will bring to OGCInteroperability Program (IP) initiatives,” said George Percivall, Chief Architect and Executive Director, OGC Interoperability Program. “Lew brings a wealth of experience fromleading prior OGC initiatives, including the fourth OGC Web Services Testbed (OWS-4)and the Geo-Decision Support Services (GeoDSS)activity. As the first member of the OGC IP Staff in Europe, Bart begins whatwe anticipate will be an exciting and broad-ranging program of OGC projectsfocused in Europe.”

Lew will begin byleading the OGC Climatology-Hydrology Information Sharing Pilot, Phase 1 (CHISP-1) that will advance hydrology services usingopen standards in an operational, cross-border setting, creating a model foruse around the world.  Lew brings exceptional experience with the OASIS EmergencyData Exchange Language (EDXL) andNIEM (National Information Exchange Model). His experience will be acritical asset as the OGC works to advance open geospatial standards in thearea of information sharing for intelligence and homeland securityapplications.  

Bart will lead the OGC element of the COBWEB (“Citizen OBservatoryWEB”) project recently awarded by the European Commission. COBWEB focuses on crowdsourcing ofgeospatial environmental information, addressing privacy and security elements. Bart will also represent OGC in the EO2HEAVEN (Earth Observation andEnvironmental Modelling for the Mitigation of Health Risks) project and theGEOSS (Global Earth Observation System of Systems) Architecture ImplementationPilot. He leads project development in Europe on many fronts, with particularemphasis on Building Information based on his successful service at Autodesk. Thiswork will support adoption of the OGC CityGML standard for storage and exchangeof virtual 3D city models.

About the OGC

The OGC is aninternational consortium of more than 460 companies, government agencies,research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus processto develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperablesolutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-basedservices, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers tomake geospatial information and services accessible and useful with anyapplication that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.