Marie-Françoise Voidrot receives OGC’s Gardels Award

The Gardels Award is awarded each year to individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to advance OGC's vision of geospatial information fully integrated into the world's information systems.

As a member of the OGC, Marie-Françoise’s contributions have been significant and enduring, with high recognition for championing and generating enthusiasm for OGC standards across the international Met-Ocean community, and within Météo-France.

As co-chair of the OGC Meteorological & Oceanography Domain Working Group (DWG), Marie-Françoise ensured that time-dependent and multi-dimensional data were properly supported by OGC services. Thanks in part to her leadership, the OGC Met-Ocean DWG has been able not only to operate through regular meetings within the OGC structure, but also to extend the working group’s reach by convening meetings with related groups in the wider international community.

Additionally, Marie-Françoise has been instrumental in sustaining a key long-term relationship between the OGC and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). These accomplishments, as well as her leadership in facilitating approval and publication of numerous documents from the Met-Ocean DWG, have been key to OGC’s increased presence in the Meteorological community.

Marie-Françoise’s influence and contributions to the OGC mission have extended well-beyond the Met-Ocean domain to other OGC working groups and activities, including the OGC France Forum in which she helped to coordinate and promote OGC standards awareness and adoption in France.

In all this work, Marie-Françoise has demonstrated the personal excellence and social commitment that represent the highest values of the Consortium and the intent of this award, while exemplifying the principles, courage, humility, and accomplishments in promoting spatial technologies to address the needs of humanity that characterized Kenn Gardels’ career and life.

Mark Reichardt, President and CEO of OGC, commented: “I am delighted with the selection of Marie-Francoise Voidrot for the 2017 Gardels Award. Her outstanding leadership and commitment to the Meteorology and Oceans communities within the OGC process, and with our international alliance partners such as the World Meteorology Organization, has led to significant progress in improving interoperability in order to help understand and address increasingly complex challenges.”

The Gardels Award is the OGC’s highest honor bestowed upon a Consortium member representative. It is given annually in memory of Kenneth Gardels, a founding director of OGC and OGC's former director of academic programs. Mr. Gardels coined the term “Open GIS,” and devoted his life to the humane and democratic uses of geographic information systems. He died at the age of 44 in 1999.

Image; Mark Reichardt, OGC President & CEO, (left) and Jeff Harris, Chairman of the OGC Board of Directors, (right) present Marie-Françoise Voidrot with the 2017 Gardels Award.