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OGC Standards a Topic at EGU General Assembly

The European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly 2010 will bring more than 8,000 geoscientists from all over the world to Vienna, Austria, 2-7 May 2010. More than 25% of member organizations in the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) represent the geosciences or the academic community, and thus OGC standards that support management and sharing of scientific data will be a topic of interest at the Assembly.

Dr. David Arctur, OGC's Director of Interoperability Programs, along with Dr. Paul Smits from the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC), who leads the technical coordination of INSPIRE, and Dr Stefano Nativi, with the Italian National Research Council, will co-host a Town Hall Meeting at EGU on Implementing the INSPIRE European Directive: a Geoscience Perspective. Dr. Arctur will also co-convene session 16 of the Earth & Space Science Informatics (ESSI) track on Real Use of Standards and Technologies, as well as reporting on the OGC Web Services Initiative Phase 6 (OWS-6) in ESSI session 8. OWS-6 was an ambitious 6-month prototyping testbed involving more than 40 agencies, university research groups and commercial companies.

The conference's Hydrology, ESSI, and Energy, Resources and Environment themes align with the interests of OGC Working Groups that are working to advance standards for data discovery and access, workflow, interoperability of computational models, grid computing and sensor webs in these disciplines.

The recent eruption of the volcano in Iceland will be the focus of a special session to review the volcanology, paleo-record, ash plume dispersal, and aviation impacts of the eruption.

The OGC® is an international consortium of over 390 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OpenGIS® Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/.