Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)

A non-profit, international, voluntary consensus standards organization that is leading the development of standards for geospatial and location based services.

Description

From the OGC website:

Vision: A world in which everyone benefits from geographic information and services made available across any network, application, or platform.

Mission:Our core mission is to deliver spatial interface specifications that are openly available for global use.

OGC has nearly 300 members across the industry, academic and government sectors. It works closely with ISO TC211. Some flagship specifications include:

  • Web service interfaces: Web Map Server (WMS), Web Feature Server (WFS), Web Coverage Server (WCS)
  • An XML "toolkit" for earth-related data, the Geography Markup Language (GML)
  • SensorML for describing characteristics of sensors
  • Catalog Services for the Web (CSW) - for publishing and searching metadata

Adopted specifications are included in a number of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) products. As well, there is an increasing amount of Free Open Source Software (FOSS) implementing the specifications (e.g. , , , , , , etc.)

Reference URLs: 
OGC website
Maturity Estimate: 
Mature
Posted November 28th, 2007 by awoolf
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