Open Geospatial Consortium

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The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international voluntary consensus standards organization. In the OGC, more than 360 commercial, governmental, nonprofit and research organizations worldwide collaborate in an open consensus process encouraging development and implementation of standards for geospatial content and services, GIS data processing and exchange.

It was previously known as Open GIS Consortium.

1 Specifications
2 Collaboration
3 See also
4 External links

Specifications

Most of the OGC standards are based on a generalized architecture captured in a set of documents collectively called the Abstract Specification, which describes a basic data model for geographic features to be represented. Atop the Abstract Specification is a growing number of specifications, or standards, that have been (or are being) developed to serve specific needs for interoperable location and geospatial technology, including GIS.

Relationship between clients/servers and some OGC protocols

The are currently 28 standards in the OGC standards baseline, including:

OGC Reference Model - a complete set of reference models.
WMS - Web Map Service: Provides map images.
WFS - Web Feature Service: For retrieving or altering feature descriptions.
WCS - Web Coverage Service: Provide coverage objects from a specified region.
WPS - Web Processing Service: Remote processing service.
CSW - Web Catalog Service: Access to catalog information.
SFS - Simple Features - SQL
GML - Geography Markup Language: XML format for geographical information.
KML - Keyhole Markup Language: XML-based language schema for expressing geographic annotation and visualization on existing or future Web-based, two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers.
OWS - OGC Web Service Common

These were originally designed around the REST paradigm for message-based interactions in web-based systems. However, in the last year the members have been working on defining a common approach for SOAP and WSDL bindings.

Collaboration

The OGC has a close relationship with ISO/TC 211 (Geographic Information/Geomatics). The OGC abstract specification is being progressively replaced by volumes from the ISO 19100 series under development by this committee. Further, the OGC standards Web Map Service, GML and Simple Features Access are ISO standards.

The OGC works with other international standards bodies including W3C, OASIS, WfMC, and the IETF.