The Open Geospatial Consortium, or OGC, is an international voluntary consensus standards organization. In the OGC, more than 300 commercial, governmental, nonprofit and research organisations 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.

Based on the so-called abstract specification - describing a basic data model for geographic features to be represented - an increasing number of specifications are developed to serve specific needs for interoperable location and geospatial technology, including GIS.

The most important OGC specifications:

• OGC Reference Model - a complete set of reference models.
• WMS - Web Map Service
• WFS - Web Feature Service
• WCS - Web Coverage Service
• CAT - Web Catalog Service
• SFS - Simple Features - SQL
• GML - Geography Markup Language

These are primarily designed around the REST paradigm for message-based interactions in web-based systems.

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.

See also

• GPS
• GeoTools - Implements all OGC standards as they are released

External links

• Open Geospatial Consortium
• OpenGIS(R) Specifications by OGC
• Open GPSToolKit.
• 211
• OGR - OGR library which implements relevant OGC standards
• Open Source Geospatial Foundation - which actively promotes free and open standards
• Open Source GIS Master Index of Open Source GIS projects, many of which implement OGC standards

Standards organizations | Geographic Information Systems

Open Geospatial Consortium | Open Geospatial Consortium | Open Geospatial Consortium | Open Geospatial Consortium | Open Geospatial Consortium | Open Geospatial Consortium | Open Geospatial Consortium