The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) announces that it has appointed Dr. Ingo Simonis to the position of Director, Interoperability Programs and Science. As Director, Interoperability Programs and Science, Simonis, who is based in Germany, will work with OGC members to plan, manage, and develop architectures for OGC interoperability initiatives such as testbeds, pilots, and interoperability experiments. He has a long history of working in the OGC process as a member, and he brings those years of experience to this role. 
Since 2000, Ingo Simonis has been a principal developer of OGC’s Sensor Web Enablement initiative. He has authored four OGC standards and been a member of the OGC Interoperability Projects Team. He has served as lead architect for an OGC testbed thread. He has also served as lead architect for the GEOSS (Group on Earth Observation System of Systems) Application Integration Pilot activities, which are administered by the OGC on behalf of the GEO organization.
He has led a broad range of international research and development projects and research groups. He co-founded the international open source initiative 52°North and was the 52°North-Sensor Web community lead. In 2009, he founded with Martin Klopfer (Technical Director OGC Europe), the International Geospatial publications Institute, iGSI, which provided leadership of the Sensors ANYwhere (SANY) FP7 project.
While pursuing all of these activities, Ingo Simonis has also had a distinguished academic career in the fields of ecology and geoinformatics. Most recently he has worked at South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and will continue to lecture at Carinthia University. His recent research has focused on the integration and analysis of complex data structures in the context of large-scale sensor networks.
In 2010, he received the OGC Kenneth D. Gardels award for the extraordinary contribution he has made throughout all phases of the design, development and market acceptance of the OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards.
The OGC is an international geospatial standards consortium of more than 495 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. Visit the OGC website.
