Olaf Østensen is the Chair of ISO/TC 211 and has been actively engaged in standards development within the field of geographic information since the early 1980s. He is the head of a technology department within the Norwegian Mapping and Cadastre Authority under the Ministry of the Environment, and is responsible for the Norwegian geoportal, an essential component of the national geospatial infrastructure serving a broad community that includes the environmental sector. Mr. Østensen has been an active contributor to the development of policies and technologies for geospatial infrastructure at the international level. He has obtained a Masters of Science.

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Dr. John Herring is a mathematician and topologist by training and a computer scientist and software architect by trade. He has worked spatial data handing since 1983, and spatial standards since 1985. Currently he works for Oracle in spatial standards and as architect for Oracle Spatial. He has participated in ISO TC 211 and OGC almost from their inception. In ISO he is currently the Convenor for the Harmonized Model Management Group (HMMG), and as editor in several standards projects. In OGC he is a member of the Architecture Board, and was the first recipient of OGC's Gardel's Award for "overall, long-term contributions to the community." 

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Marie-Lise Vautier is an R&D engineer in IGN’s Standardization Unit. She has been actively involved as a technical expert in international standards development in ISO/TC 211 and OGC as well as in the defense sector. She has also been a contributor to several European projects, such as SDIGER, GIGAS and HMA-T, dealing with various aspects of spatial data infrastructures. Her field of expertise mainly concerns data portrayal, catalogue services and metadata, data structures (GML) and web service technologies.”

 Mark Reichardt is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC). Mr. Reichardt has overall responsibility for Consortium operations, overseeing the development and promotion of OpenGIS® standards and working to ensure that OGC programs foster member success. He works with other standards development organizations and professional associations to establish alliance agreements to assure that OGC standards and other standards work together fluidly. Such coordination is critical, for example, to support standards that enable the full integration of geospatial information with real time sensor data and Building Information Models (BIM) used in architecture, engineering, construction and full life cycle management of buildings and other physical infrastructure. Mr. Reichardt joined the Consortium in November 2000 as Director of Marketing and Public Sector Programs; became the President of OGC and a member of the Board of Directors in September, 2004; and was appointed President and CEO in January 2008.

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Robert Olszewski works at the Department of Cartography, Warsaw University of Technology, Poland. Since 1995 he has been active in Cartography and GIS. He completed his PhD (2001), with a thesis about fractal geometry and analyses. He published 2 books and over 80 scientific articles. His research interest involves spatial data mining, cartographic modeling, generalization of geographic information, cellular automata, fuzzy sets and systems, neural networks and fractal geometry.

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Rob Walker is an independent consultant in geographical information, specialising in standards for GI. He is active in standards development in ISO/TC 211 and is Vice-Chairman of CEN/TC 287. He in a member of the Council of the UK’s Association for Geographic Information (AGI), and was Chairman in 2008. He is currently Chair of CEN/TC 287

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Gearóid  O’Riain is the founder and managing director of Compass Informatics, a geomatics and bioinformatics company based in Ireland.  Gearóid is heavily involved in the design of geomatics applications in the planning and natural resources areas, and also leads many initiatives relating to INSPIRE and SDI.  Through the operation of the National Biodiversity Data Centre, Ireland, he has a familiarity with standards in the bioinformatics area, with the Data Centre acting as the Irish national node in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.  With his colleague, Roger Longhorn, Gearóid will attend and present at the meeting

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 Keith Murray is Technical Director of the UK Location Programme which is responsible to the Location Council and the delivery of the UK Location Strategy and coordinating INSPIRE obligations. He has been an active member of the INSPIRE Data Specifications Drafting Team since 2005 and was facilitator of the INSPIRE Transport Networks Thematic Working Group. He has extensive experience in developing the concepts behind OS MasterMap in the Digital National Framework as well as working within  EuroSDR and with EuroGeographics over the last 10 years. More recently the UKLP has been working closely with the team developing data.gov.uk 

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 Simon Cox, originally from the UK, and more recently Australia, works on interoperability standards in the SDI unit at JRC. He obtained a Ph.D. in geophysics from Columbia University (New York), following degrees in geology at Cambridge and London.  Simon joined the JRC recently, taking a break from CSIRO Australia, where he has been based for over 20 years. While in Australia he also lectured for a while at Monash University in Melbourne. After starting professional life in experimental rock mechanics, on recognizing that the earth is the best laboratory he moved to image processing and spatial data. He was responsible for one of the earliest web-mapping applications in 1995. After working on metadata for several years he went on to focus on standards for spatial and scientific data.  Starting from use-cases primarily relating to natural environment applications (geology, water) Simon aims to develop interoperability solutions with general applicability.  Simon has been active within the Open Geospatial Consortium, chairing working groups, editing and contributing to several standards, and was awarded the 2006 Gardels medal.  He is currently editor of ISO 19156 (Observations and Measurements) and chair of the OGC Naming Authority. 

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 Arnold K Bregt   is professor of Geo-information Science at Wageningen University in The Netherlands. Since 2006 he is also scientific director of the “space for geo-information” innovation program. Following more than 20 years of experience in the field of GIS research and applications, his current areas of interest are spatial data quality, dynamic modeling of land use change and spatial data infrastructures. He holds a MSc and a PhD degree from Wageningen University.

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 Stefano Nativi. TheEuropean GEO SIF has been initiated by the GIGAS project in an effort to better coordinate European requirements for GEO and GEOSS related activities, and is recognised by GEO as a regional SIF.
To help advance the interoperability goals of the Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS), the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) Architecture and Data Committee (ADC) has established a Standards and Interoperability Forum (SIF) to support GEO organizations offering components and services to GEOSS.
The SIF will help GEOSS contributors understand how to work with the GEOSS interoperability guidelines and how to enter their “interoperability arrangements” (standards or other ad hoc arrangements for interoperability) into the GEOSS registries. This will greatly facilitate the utility of GEOSS and encourage significant increase in participation. To carry out its work most effectively, the SIF promotes to form Regional Teams. They will help to organize and optimize the support coming from the different parts of the World and reach out regional and multi-disciplinary Scientific Communities. This will allow to have true global representation in supporting GEOSS interoperability. A SIF European Team is foreseen.
The main role of the SIF is facilitating interoperability and working with members and participating organizations as they offer data and information services to the users of GEOSS. In this framework, the purpose of having a European Regional Team is to increase efficiency in carrying out the work of the SIF.

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Professor Pachelski trained as a Geodesist, specializing in geodetic theory and computations, and GIS. In 1993 he was nominate a full professor, also becoming Polish delegate to CEN/TC 287. ISO/TC 211. In 2002 he became head of the Polish national standardization Technical Committee 297 on GI and in 2004 became co-chair of the AG on Outreach of the CEN/TC 287.        Between 2002 - 2009 he was a Professor at the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn and until 2004 at the Space Research Centre of Polish Academy of Sciences..From 2004 - 2007 he was Professor at the Warsaw University of Technology. Currently he is a Professor at the Military Academy of Technology in Warsaw, lecturing on GI methodology and standards

Paul Janssen came from the FAO of the United Nations, joining the Netherlands Council for Geo-Information, Ravi, in 2002 as project officer standardization and continued his activities from 2007 on with Geonovum. Recently he supervised the renewal of the Dutch Base Model for Geo Information. Under his responsibility originated the renewal of the Dutch semantic standard: Information Model for Spatial Planning and corresponding application schema. Responsibilities furthermore include training of and extension to technical and management level staff of the governmental institutions involved in domain specific information modelling and leading working groups of specialists to develop and reassess the information models to real world applications. He is a member of the National Commission for Standardization of Geo-information and of the CEN / TC 287.

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Clemens Portele is co-owner and Managing Director of interactive instruments, a provider of software solutions and services for the integration of geographic information in IT infrastructures, committed to the application and propagation of open standards. Mr Portele has a degree in Physics from the University of Bonn, 20 years of experience in the field of geographic information technology and is active in the international standardisation in this field since 1993 - first in CEN/TC 287 and later in ISO/TC 211 and OGC. In 2007 he received the Kenneth D. Gardels award in recognition of his contributions to the OGC. In INSPIRE he is chairing the Drafting Team "Data Specifications". Within the GIGAS project his is leading the activity on data harmonisation and semantic interoperability.

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