OGC Elects Two New Directors

Dr. R. Siva Kumar and Ben Eazzetta have been elected to the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.
(OGC) board of directors.

Dr. Siva Kumar heads the Natural Resources Data Management Systems (NRDMS) and the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) Division of the Department of Science and Technology of the Government of India. He holds the rank of Brigadier in the Corps of Engineers of the Indian Army and was Member Secretary of the Government's Task Force for planning implementation of the NSDI in India. Active in OGC affairs for several years, he has played a leading role in creating awareness of OGC in the Indian government.

Mr. Ben Eazzetta is president of the Security, Government & Infrastructure Division of the Intergraph Corporation. Since coming to Intergraph from ExxonMobil six years ago, and before assuming his present duties, Mr. Eazzetta held the position of COO in Intergraph's Process, Power & Offshore Division and was then President of Intergraph's Public Safety Division.

David Schell, chairman of the Board of the OGC, said, "We are fortunate indeed that Dr. Kumar is willing to lend his prestige and obvious energies to the task of building a meaningful bridge between the consortium and the Indian geospatial community. Ben Eazzetta brings with him an industrial process perspective that is of great value to OGC at a time when the market for spatial information is being expanded and recharacterized. These new directors will help the OGC meet its two main challenges: to address international growth and to address information community interoperability requirements that go beyond the now largely solved problem of communication between different geospatial software products."