May 28, 2014 -- The Virginia-based United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) recognized industry innovation and employment of OGC standards to nearly 4,000 international attendees at the 2014 GEOINT Symposium in Tampa, Florida.

Pixia Corp, a US commercial software company in Reston, Virginia was the sole USGIF industry award recipient at this year's conference. They were recognized for developing what has now become the widely accepted international best practice specification for Wide Area Motion Imagery (WAMI), which provides unprecedented universal data access and dissemination.  Pixia invented, developed, and donated its WAMI specification to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), who in turn adopted the specification as the OGC international WAMI Best Practice. This effort paves the way for a future user environment that leverages standard open architectures across all geospatial data types.

According to Rudi Ernst, Pixia Corp CEO, "OGC standards are crucial to making data relevant and useful. Users and data collectors must look to architectures that leverage open standards to enable them to collect, combine, analyze and share knowledge to make critical decisions when time matters." 

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 475 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's open 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/contact.