Mark Reichardt Honoured with Special Edition of OGC Gardels Award
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Mark Reichardt Honoured with Special Edition of OGC Gardels Award

At the December 2018 meeting of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Technical Committee in Fort Collins, Colorado, USA, OGC’s outgoing president and CEO, Mark Reichardt, was awarded a special edition of OGC’s prestigious Kenneth D. Gardels Award. The Award is presented each year to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to advancing OGC's vision of fully integrating geospatial information into the world's information systems.

This special edition of the award, the second Gardel’s Award to be awarded in 2018, was awarded to Reichardt by the OGC Board of Directors in recognition of his years of leadership, commitment, passion and dedication to the advancement of interoperability and open OGC standards.

OGC chair, Jeff Harris, commented that Mark Reichardt’s keen understanding of the application of technology across diverse missions and markets has enabled significant innovation, which has resulted in improved public safety and business outcomes. His leadership of the Consortium has built enduring relationships that will enable increased location data interoperability, he added.

Open geospatial standards and innovation

Mark Reichardt joined the Consortium in November 2000 as director of marketing and public sector programs, becoming president in 2004 and additionally taking on the role of CEO in 2008. He has since led a global team of members and staff to innovatively drive geospatial data sharing for all. Under Reichardt’s leadership, the Consortium has grown and established itself as the world’s leading organisation for open geospatial standards and innovation. OGC’s standards development process and Innovation Program have since repeatedly enabled the rapid transformation of ideas into implementations.

Time and location, when aligned, shared and acted upon, improves and saves lives. Mark Reichardt’s evangelising of this concept, coupled with an appreciation of geospatial technology as a mission-enabler, not only resulted in impressive operational improvements across a variety of diverse domains, but also created new connections between disconnected domains, and opened new markets to the value of geospatial information.

During all his time at OGC, Mark Reichardt has demonstrated the integrity, humility and dedication in promoting spatial technologies to address the needs of humanity that characterised Kenneth Gardels’ career and life.

Publicly available geospatial standards

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international consortium of more than 525 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC 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 within any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at www.opengeospatial.org.

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