MoreIntergraph Mapping and GIS Solutions announced the Intergraph Open Interoperability Grant Program, a new international grant program promoting and emphasizing the use of OGC interoperability specifications for accessing and applying geospatial information from a local to a global level. The announcement coincides with the sixth Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) Conference being held this week in Budapest, Hungary.
This broad new initiative, with a value of more than $5.5 million (U.S.), supports the GSDI organization's mission of ready global access to geographic information. The program will emphasize the use worldwide of OpenGIS Specifications from the geospatial industry standards body, the Open GIS Consortium (OGC). The grant program actively promotes interoperability and enables organizations using geospatial information to build open Web services and publish their data using Geography Markup Language (GML), thereby allowing easy and open exchange of data.
Participating organizations in the Intergraph grant program will benefit from expanded interoperability and improved communications throughout their enterprise. The program focuses on the development and deployment of compatible spatial data infrastructures based on internationally accepted best practices, and helps bring the GSDI organization's goals for worldwide spatial data sharing closer to reality.
As a member of the GSDI organization and a founding and strategic member of the Open GIS Consortium (OGC), Intergraph actively engages in the process of building open standards. The grant program takes a proactive approach to proliferating OGC specification standards around the world.
Each grant includes Intergraph's GeoMedia Professional and GeoMedia WebMap, a Web map server (WMS) adapter kit for GeoMedia WebMap, GML data server, GML export command, maintenance program, Team GeoMedia Subscriber membership, technical support, and membership in the Intergraph GeoSpatial Users Community (IGUC). GeoMedia products and technology, built on the premise of open industry standards, fully promote ease of data sharing within and across organizations.
With an Intergraph grant, an organization can leverage disparate data from multiple sources - regardless of vendor brand, format, or platform - to easily and dynamically publish data in open, industry-standard formats to the Web. This enables them to maximize the reuse of geospatial data, eliminate time-consuming data translation, and reduce integration requirements and associated costs.
At the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure 6 Conference in Budapest, Preetha Pulusani, president of Intergraph Mapping and GIS Solutions and a member of the OGC board of directors, encourages organizations to apply for 100 grants that will be awarded during the next year.
