Wayland, MA, August 21, 2001. – The Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC) announces that an OpenGIS® Recommendation has been made available to the public. The paper titled “Recommended Definition Data for Coordinate Reference Systems and Coordinate Transformations” is available for public review at http://www.opengeospatial.org/techno/specs.htm. This Recommendation Paper specifies a data model for metadata in support of the OpenGIS Coordinate Reference Systems (CRS) and Coordinate Transformations (CT) Implementation Specifications, and specifies standard definition data for the data model.Because the specified data model is more general than an OpenGIS Implementation Specification and more specific than the OpenGIS Abstract Specification, the work is being delivered in a Recommendation Paper. Representatives from three OGC member organizations, BAE SYSTEMS Mission Solutions, the Petrotechnical Open Software Corporation (POSC), and Shell International Exploration and Production B.V. developed the model using object-oriented analysis and design thinking.This specification harmonizes and improves the relevant XML work previously done by OGC. This OGC standard data model for coordinate reference systems and coordinate transformation definition data is intended for initial use with OGC's OpenGIS Geography Markup Language (GML) and Coordinate Transformation (CT) Implementation Specifications. That is, each of these two specifications is expected to use a subset and/or superset of the Definition Data described in the Recommendation Paper. Future revisions of this specification will convert the current XML Document Type Definitions (DTD) to XML Schema.Comments regarding this Recommendation Paper should be forwarded to the OGC Coordinate Transformation Working Group at ct.wg@opengeospatial.org .OGC is an international industry consortium of over 200 companies, government agencies and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geoprocessing specifications. OpenGIS Specifications establish common interfaces that “geo-enable” the Web and mainstream IT, enabling 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 .– end –“