September 29, 2010. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) and the IJIS Institute have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to work together on efforts to support information sharing and interoperability related to public safety, justice and homeland security.
The two organizations will participate in joint outreach and marketing activities and collaborative testbed and pilot projects designed to advance and deliver open standards and best practices of value to lJlS Institute members and the broader public safety, justice and homeland security communities.
“Our partnership with the IJIS will enable OGC members to work with public safety experts from industry, government, academia and research organizations to improve our understanding of the interoperability challenges involved in public safety, justice and Homeland Security,” explained Mark Reichardt, OGC's president and CEO. “Our members can help the IJIS community benefit from the significant interoperability framework that the OGC has already created to improve situational awareness and location-based decision making.”
According to Paul Wormeli, executive director of the IJIS Institute, “The future of information sharing, particularly in public safety, includes a reliance on standards for using geospatial and location-based data. We look forward to working closely with the OGC to bring their expertise in geospatial standards to the public safety and homeland security world. Together we expect to make fundamental improvements in the ease of sharing location information across agency boundaries.”
About the IJIS Institute
The IJIS Institute (http://www.ijis.org/), a nonprofit organization, unites the private and public sectors to improve critical information sharing for those who protect and serve our communities. The IJIS Institute provides training, technology assistance, national scope issue management, and program management services to help government fully realize the power of information sharing.
About the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®)
The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 395 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. 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/contact.
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