OGC

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international standards organization focused on geospatial content and services. It was founded in 1994 as the Open GIS Consortium to coordinate the development of open standards that enable interoperable use and sharing of geospatial information across software, data, and services.

OGC operates as a membership organization comprising governmental agencies, corporations, research institutions, and individuals. Its standards are developed through an open, consensus-based process and are publicly available for implementation. The consortium also runs the Interoperability Program, which conducts demonstrations and testbeds to validate conformance and interoperability among software components.

A core function of the OGC is the publication of open standards for encoding, retrieving, and processing geospatial data. Notable standards include Web Map Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS), and Web Coverage Service (WCS) for map and feature delivery; Geography Markup Language (GML) for feature encoding; and Web Processing Service (WPS) for server-side processing. Additional specifications cover sensor data (Sensor Web Enablement), packaging formats (GeoPackage), and 3D city models (CityGML), among others. These standards are widely implemented in software from commercial vendors, open-source projects, and government programs to support interoperable geospatial workflows.

The OGC standards have contributed to interoperable geospatial ecosystems, enabling data sharing, cross-platform analyses, and services across agencies and industries worldwide.