OGCStandards

OGC Standards are a family of open, consensus-based specifications published by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to enable interoperability of geospatial data, services, and processing across diverse platforms and sectors. The Open Geospatial Consortium, formed in 1994 from the OpenGIS Consortium, coordinates international collaboration among government agencies, industry, and academia to define common interfaces and encodings for geographic information.

Core areas include service interfaces (for example, Web Map Service WMS, Web Feature Service WFS, Web Coverage Service WCS, and Web Processing Service WPS), data encoding formats (such as Geography Markup Language GML), and domain models used in geospatial applications. In addition, OGC has standards for data management, cataloging and discovery (like CSW - Catalogue Service for the Web) and for 3D and city scale data (for example CityGML).

Standards are developed through an open, consensus-based process that emphasizes interoperability and vendor-neutral specifications. The OGC provides conformance tests and a certification program to help ensure that software products correctly implement a standard. Adoption of OGC Standards facilitates cross-platform data sharing, web mapping, and geospatial processing in government, industry, and research.

OGC standards are widely used in GIS software, government geospatial infrastructures, environmental monitoring, urban planning, telecommunications, and defense. Access to the standards is public, and organizations can participate in working groups through membership or public participation channels.