October 9, 2009, Wayland, Massachusetts. The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC(R)) announces that Dr. Carl Reed, the CTO and Executive Director of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Standards Program, has been inducted into the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA) GIS Hall of Fame.
URISA established the GIS Hall of Fame to recognize and honor leaders of the geospatial community. To be considered for the GIS Hall of Fame, an individual's record of contribution to the advancement of the industry must demonstrate creative thinking and actions, vision and innovation, inspiring leadership, perseverance, and community mindedness. URISA Hall of Fame Laureates are individuals or organizations whose pioneering work has moved the geospatial industry in a better, stronger direction.
Reed began his GIS career in 1969 while in university, programming an interactive GIS application for mapping and analyzing meteorological observations, one of the first interactive mapping applications. In 1977 and 1978, he designed and programmed the Map Overlay and Statistical System (MOSS), the first fully interactive, full function vector based GIS. MOSS was also the first open source GIS activity, predating GRASS (the US Army Corps of Engineers' Geographic Resources Analysis Support System) by several years. Dr. Reed received his PhD in Geography, specializing in GIS technology and systems architectures, from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1980.
In 1985, Reed led the GenaMap design and development team. GenaMap (originally DeltaMap) was the first commercial UNIX based GIS product. GenaMap had a number of technical firsts, such as the use of R-Trees for spatial indexing, continuous processing of tiled geographic databases, integrated vector raster processing, and on the fly projection and units transformation.
In late 1987, Reed led a project to demonstrate that seamless interoperability could be achieved between two disparate geospatial systems: GenaMap and GRASS. This groundbreaking project proved that geospatial interoperability was a realistic goal, and was a key factor in David Schell's decision to start the OpenGIS Consortium (now the Open Geospatial Consortium).
Dr. Reed has worked on geospatial standards since 1994. Early on, he recognized that in order for the geospatial community to grow and prosper, the community needed standards that enabled interoperability and broke down proprietary silos of data ownership.
Reed joined OGC staff in 2001. Since then, he has contributed to numerous international standards, including not only those of the OGC, but other e-business and Internet standards as well. To insure harmonization of geospatial standards across information communities, he actively participates in and collaborates with other standards organizations, including OASIS, NENA, ISO, W3C and the IETF. Reed currently participates in numerous editorial and advisory boards, including the GeoWeb 2009 planning committee. He is the OGC alternate to the GSDI Board of Directors, and is working on numerous book chapters. In recognition of his contribution to the GIS industry, in 1996, Reed was voted by his peers as one of the top ten most influential people in the GIS industry.
The OGC(R) is an international consortium of more than 380 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OpenGIS(R) 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.
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