OGC recognizes and celebrates Ivan’s lifetime of service and his steadfast support of geospatial open standards as a component of improved efficiency, governance, and decision-making.
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is proud to announce that Ivan DeLoatch is the latest recipient of the OGC Lifetime Achievement Award. The OGC Lifetime Achievement Award is given on occasion to an individual who has provided exceptional service, over many years, advancing seamless data interoperability.
“Ivan was selected to receive the OGC Lifetime Achievement Award due to his noteworthy leadership, commitment, and support promoting geographic information, technologies, and standards-based interoperability while advancing national and international geospatial policies, programs, and activities,” commented Jeff Harris, Chair of the OGC Board of Directors. “With this award, OGC recognizes and celebrates Ivan’s lifetime of service and his steadfast support of geospatial open standards as a component of improved efficiency, governance, and decision-making.”
Over his 33-year career, Ivan has served as a local-to-global champion and Geospatial Ambassador promoting open data principles, developing open spatial data infrastructure (SDIs), architectures, and standards, and leading policy and partnership efforts to enhance mission outcomes.”
Ivan’s responsibilities as Executive Director of the Federal Geographic Committee and the OGC Strategic Management Advisory Committee allowed him to champion and sponsor OGC Innovation Program activities for over 20 years. Examples include pilots that supported GEOSS Architecture Implementation, Arctic Spatial Data Infrastructure, and Disaster Risk Resilience. Ivan recognized that barriers to adoption could be reduced by advocating implementation enablers including OGC API, GeoPackage, Cloud Services, and Health Spatial Data Infrastructure efforts.
Instrumental in Ivan’s success was his ability to garner support and establish public-private partnerships exemplified in the establishment of the National Geospatial Advisory Committee (NGAC) securing more than US$20 million in multi-year grant and agreement funding to advance geospatial adoption. These efforts and grants provided understanding of SDIs, created collaborations at all levels of government, provided seed funding to enable organizations to participate in efforts to implement local-to-global SDIs and promoted standardized metadata. He was instrumental in developing partnerships, framework data services, and data stewardship across national and sub-national governments, including private and academic entities. Ivan’s leadership was foundational in the establishment of the US Geospatial Data Act of 2018 that serves as a model to facilitate global adoption of SDIs.
About OGC
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is a collective problem-solving community of more than 550 experts representing industry, government, research and academia, collaborating to make geospatial (location) information and services FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.
The global OGC Community engages in a mix of activities related to location-based technologies: developing consensus-based open standards and best-practices; collaborating on problem solving in agile innovation initiatives; participating in member meetings, events, and workshops; and more.
OGC’s unique standards development process moves at the pace of innovation, with constant input from technology forecasting, practical prototyping, real-world testing, and community engagement.
OGC bridges disparate sectors, domains, and technology trends, and encourages the cross-pollination of ideas between different communities of practice to improve decision-making at all levels. OGC is committed to creating an inclusive and sustainable future.
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