The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) and the International Environmental Modeling & Software Society (iEMSs) Secretariat have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to collaborate in standards development, education and outreach to enable and promote the use of interoperable Web based geospatial technologies in environmental modeling and software tools.

"The time has come for environmental models to interconnect flexibly with one another and with services and data from other disciplines," explained Phillip C. Dibner, a consulting scientist and engineer, and chair of the OGC Earth System Science Domain Working Group. "Typically, this is difficult and cumbersome, but it becomes much more feasible when models implement open interface and encoding standards..."

Alexey Voinov, President of iEMSs, said, "Models are more than data and more than software. To connect various models in a meaningful and efficient way is a challenge since we need to connect paradigms, scales, algorithms, etc. Yet it is essential since there is growing interest in integrated modeling as a way to study complex systems. OGC has had much success in developing interfaces and encoding standards for data. We hope that together we can learn how to better connect models."

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