Open Geospatial Consortium

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The Open Geospatial Consortium, or OGC, is an international voluntary consensus standards organization. In the OGC, more than 330+ 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.

Most of the OGC specifications 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 Specifiation 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.

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 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.

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 and Simple Features are ISO standards. GML will soon be approved as an ISO standard.

The name OpenGIS also refers to the Open-Source Gateway Information Service, an open-source communication solution, found at OpenGIS Communication Solutions