Wayland, MA, 19 January 2010.  The Open Geospatial Consortium,
Inc. (OGC) and the International Environmental Modeling & Software
Society (iEMSs) Secretariat have signed a Memorandum of Understanding
(MOU) to collaborate in standards development, education and outreach
to enable and promote the use of interoperable Web based geospatial
technologies in environmental modeling and software tools.

“The time has come for environmental models to interconnect flexibly
with one another and with services and data from other disciplines,”
explained Phillip C. Dibner, a consulting scientist and engineer, and
chair of the OGC Earth System Science Domain Working Group.
“Typically, this is difficult and cumbersome, but it becomes much more
feasible when models implement open interface and encoding
standards…”

Alexey Voinov, President of iEMSs, said, “Models are more than data
and more than software. To connect various models in a meaningful and
efficient way is a challenge since we need to connect paradigms,
scales, algorithms, etc. Yet it is essential since there is growing
interest in integrated modeling as a way to study complex systems. OGC
has had much success in developing interfaces and encoding standards
for data. We hope that together we can learn how to better connect
models.”

About iEMSs

The iEMSs (pronounced “eye-em-es”) (http://www.iemss.org) is a
not-for-profit organization uniting people and organizations dealing
with environmental modeling, software and related topics. The iEMSs
seeks to develop and use environmental modeling and software tools to
advance science and improve decision making with respect to resource
and environmental issues. This places an emphasis on interdisciplinary
and the development of generic frameworks and methodologies which
integrate environmental models and software tools.

About the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®)

The OGC® 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® 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/.