Charles Heazel receives OGC’s 2020 Gardels Award

The Gardels Award is presented each year to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to advancing OGC's vision of fully integrating geospatial information into the world's information systems.

Chuck Heazel was selected because of his broad work in building consensus on standardization approaches by working on multiple efforts with deep technical expertise and excellent coordination amongst stakeholders. A member of the nominating committee noted that Chuck was “clearly at the top of the list on the basis of his contributions and particularly recent hard work and clear thinking on APIs.” Chuck has shown particular skill in understanding Standards requirements and developing clear, concise documentation of the content, such as for GeoTIFF, CityGML 3.0, and OGC API – Common.

“OGC values Chuck’s dedication to the advancement of high-quality Standards through his active technical leadership in the OGC Architecture Board (OAB) helping to drive the Web API Guidelines,” commented Jeffrey Harris, OGC Chair. “The OGC APIs are amongst the most important work to empower location interoperability and Chuck’s ability to align parties to enable the right building blocks to empower market-ready Standards is key to the progression of that effort.”