Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
Overview
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international organization that develops and promotes open standards for geospatial content and services, GIS data processing, and data sharing. Founded in 1994, the OGC brings together government agencies, commercial organizations, and academic institutions to collaborate on creating interoperable location-based technologies.
Key Concepts
Open standards are publicly available specifications that enable interoperability between different software systems and data formats. Interoperability is the ability of different systems and organizations to work together and exchange geospatial data seamlessly. Implementation specifications are detailed technical documents that define how OGC standards should be implemented in software. Compliance testing is the process of verifying that software correctly implements OGC standards.
Major OGC Standards
- Web Map Service (WMS) - Serving georeferenced map images
- Web Feature Service (WFS) - Accessing vector geospatial features
- Web Coverage Service (WCS) - Accessing raster geospatial data
- Geography Markup Language (GML) - XML-based encoding for geographic information
- GeoJSON - JSON-based encoding for simple features
- Simple Features Access - Common architecture for simple feature geometry
Appendix
Created: 2025-12-13 | Modified: 2025-12-13