Wayland, MA, USA, April 9, 2004 – Today's technologies do not live in a vacuum. Government, business, academia and the public demand that information technologies work together effectively, to enable information sharing. Members of the Open GIS Consortium (OGC) will demonstrate how that can happen using OpenGIS(R) Interface Specifications at the Geospatial Information Technology Association (GITA) Annual Conference 27 in Seattle, Washington April 25-28, 2004.OGC members will demonstrate how their products take advantage of OGC interfaces to optimize discovery, access, integration and application of geospatial information and applications on servers accessible via the Internet. Vendors will illustrate a range of OpenGIS Specifications, including Web Map Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS), Coordinate Transformation, Grid Coverages, Simple Features, Catalog and Geography Markup Language (GML) Specifications.ESRI, Hitachi Software Global Technology, Ltd., Intergraph Mapping and Geospatial Solutions, Ionic Software and Safe Software Inc. will illustrate the ability of users to share data and applications across distributed networks, varying processing platforms and vendor brands. Conference attendees are encouraged to visit each of the participating vendors for a chance to win software prizes including copies of ESRI's ArcView 8.3, and Safe Software's FME 2004 ICE Professional edition.Attendees are also invited to a half-day seminar titled “Open GIS-Improving Interoperability” and sessions on OGC topics including “Open GIS Interoperability: A Requirement for Critical Infrastructure Protection and Homeland Security” and “Geospatial Interoperability by Design.”OGC is an international industry consortium of more than 250 companies, government agencies 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 www.opengeospatial.org .Further information about GITA Conference 27 is available at http://www.gita.org/events/annual/27/intro.html .– end –“