The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), an international voluntary consensus standards organization, originated in 1994. In the OGC, more than 400 commercial, governmental, nonprofit and research organizations worldwide collaborate in a consensus process encouraging development and implementation of open standards for geospatial content and services, GIS data processing and data sharing.
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A predecessor organization, OGF, the Open GRASS Foundation, started in 1992.[1]
From 1994 to 2004 the organization also used the name Open GIS Consortium.
The OGC website gives a detailed history of the OGC.[2]
Most of the OGC standards depend on a generalized architecture captured in a set of documents collectively called the Abstract Specification, which describes a basic data model for representing geographic features. Atop the Abstract Specification members have developed and continue to develop a growing number of specifications, or standards to serve specific needs for interoperable location and geospatial technology, including GIS.
More information here: http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards
The OGC standards baseline comprises more than 30 standards,[3] including:
The design of standards were originally built on the HTTP web services paradigm for message-based interactions in web-based systems. However, in the last year the members have started working on defining a common approach for SOAP protocol and WSDL bindings. Considerable progress has been made in defining Representational State Transfer (REST) web services.
The OGC has three operational units:
The OGC has a close relationship with ISO/TC 211 (Geographic Information/Geomatics). Volumes from the ISO 19100 series under development by this committee progressively replace the OGC abstract specification. Further, the OGC standards Web Map Service, GML, Web Feature Service, Observations and Measurements, and Simple Features Access have become ISO standards.
The OGC works with more than 20 international standards-bodies including W3C, OASIS, WfMC, and the IETF.
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