WAYLAND, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) and the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) announced that they have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to cooperate in advancing standards-based, interoperable work flow and Web-enabled geospatial content sharing, modeling and visualization to address the needs of their members.

Mark Reichardt, President of the OGC, explained, "The OGC is pleased to have the opportunity to work in partnership with the WfMC to help make geospatial information and processing a more integral part of workflow and business process management (BPM)."
Anticipated activities include: coordination between OGC and WfMC working groups and committees; involvement in interoperability testbeds, pilot initiatives and experiments; and outreach.

“The WfMC is excited for this partnership between the two respective industry leaders,” explained Nathaniel Palmer, Executive Director of the Workflow Management Coalition. “It took strong interoperable standards to deliver the geo-enabled Web that is critical to all business today. The next step is a ‘flow-enabled web’ to support both mass market and enterprise processes. The OGC’s track record of managing large-scale, user-focused activities and the WfMC’s leadership in process and workflow are well matched for success in this endeavor.”

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 365 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.

Founded in 1993, the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) is a global organization of over 300 adopters, developers, consultants, analysts, and university and research groups engaged in workflow and BPM. The WfMC creates and contributes to process related standards, educates the market on related issues, and is the only standards organization that concentrates purely on process. The WfMC created Wf-XML and XPDL, the leading process definition used today in over 80 known solutions to store and exchange process models.