----------------------------Original message---------------------------- This announcement is being posted to a number of listserv's. Please accept my apologies if you receive duplicates. Lance McKee Vice President, Corporate Communications Open GIS Consortium, Inc. 35 Main Street, Suite 5 Wayland, MA 01778 Tel: 508-655-5858 Fax: 508-655-2237 [log in to unmask] OGC ANNOUNCES OPEN MEETINGS OF TASK FORCE SERVING GEOSPATIAL INFORMATION IPT Wayland, MA, October 3, 1996. The Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC) today announced that on October 25, 1996 it will hold the first in a series of open public meetings of a task force co-chaired by representatives of OGC and the Geospatial Information Integrated Product Team (Geospatial Information IPT). Led by the U.S. DoD's new National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), the Geospatial Information IPT seeks widespread industry participation in development of: 1) its master plan for future requirements generation, production, management and dissemination, and application of geospatial information in national security programs; and 2) a Geospatial Prototype Facility (GPF) intended to demonstrate the proposed Geospatial Information Infrastructure. This first meeting of the OGC/IPT Task Force will be held at Mitre Corporation in McLean, VA. By the terms of its Strategic Membership in OGC, the Geospatial Information IPT will be provided by OGC with industry participation, review, assessment services, and participation in OpenGIS Specification development. OGC has begun to develop and implement for the Geospatial Information IPT a process that shapes and fuses industry and academic inputs to the planning and procurement of geospatial technologies. This process will ensure that industry input is fully and fairly presented in the Master Plan and in the leave-behind technology components that will be introduced, tested, integrated, and evaluated in the GPF. Membership in OGC is not a requirement for participation in the OGC/IPT Task Force. In this Task Force, the industry at large will provide technical input to the government for consideration in the development of the Geospatial Information Infrastructure Master Plan, as well as provide technical capabilities and support as part of the GPF. The OGC/IPT Task Force will provide NIMA with a full assessment of COTS products relevant to the DoD vision for geospatial information, and also will provide honest broker assessment of COTS products capabilities, leading to Government selection of an Initial Prototype Capability which will ultimately, after testing in larger distributed environments, yield an Initial Operating Capability. In addition, as a Task Force of the OGC Technical Committee's Application Integration Working Group, the OGC/IPT Task Force can influence and extend OpenGIS Specifications for interfaces that support interoperable geoprocessing. Other OGC members will benefit. Technology providers can participate in Geospatial IPT requirements analysis and prototyping without cause for disqualification from follow-on procurements. Providers will be able to demonstrate their new technologies and solutions -- and their new OpenGIS interoperability interfaces -- in a simulated operational environment with live data. They will get a close look at the application requirements of an important group of customers, which will enable them to refine and differentiate their product strategies. Of course, customers represented by the IPT, OGC's first Strategic Member, will benefit directly from this product focus and differentiation happening in the open market. See http://www.opengis.org for more details on the OGC/IPT Task Force meeting. - end - Lance McKee Vice President, Corporate Communications Open GIS Consortium, Inc. 35 Main Street, Suite 5 Wayland, MA 01778 USA tel: 508-655-5858 fax: 508-655-2237 [log in to unmask]