Ron Lake Receives OGC's Gardels Award

WAYLAND, MA, June 14, 2002 - At the June meeting of the Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC) in London, Ron Lake received OGC's fourth annual Kenneth G. Gardels Award. The Gardels Award, a gold medallion, is awarded to individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to advance OGC's vision of geographic information fully integrated into the world's information systems.

Ron Lake is president and CEO of Galdos Systems, Inc. (Vancouver, Canada). Active in OGC since 1994, Mr. Lake contributed significantly to the early technical vision of the consortium. The OGC Board of Directors chose to particularly recognize his work with GML (Geography Markup Language), which is now the world standard for XML encoding of geographic information and geoprocessing service requests. Mr. Lake was the principal inventor of GML, he documented it for review and acceptance as an OpenGIS Specification in OGC's consensus process, and he has promoted it tirelessly in OGC and in the world of Web-based distributed computing.

Jeff Labonte, Director of GeoConnections Programs, Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), said, "Ron Lake contributed early and often in the development of the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI), and he continues to provide regular contributions built on his OGC work and his foresight, technological depth and unrivaled vision of the future."

The award is given annually in memory of Kenneth Gardels, one of the founding directors of OGC and OGC's former director of academic programs. Mr. Gardels coined the term "Open GIS," and devoted his life to the humane and democratic uses of geographic information systems. He passed away in 1999.

OGC is an international industry consortium of more than 230 companies, government agencies and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface specifications. OpenGIS Specifications support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. The specifications empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful with all kinds of applications. Visit the OGC website.

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