| Open Geospatial Consortium | |
| Abbreviation: | OGC |
| Type: | Standards organization |
| Vat Id: | (for European organizations) --> |
| Membership: | 470+ member organizations[1] |
| Owners: | --> |
| Leader Title: | Chief Executive Officer |
| Leader Name: | Peter Rabley |
| Leader Title2: | Chief Technology Innovation Officer |
| Leader Name2: | Ingo Simonis |
| Leader Title3: | Chief Standards Officer |
| Leader Name3: | Scott Simmons |
| Leader Title4: | Operational Chief Financial Officer |
| Leader Name4: | Mitzi Osterhout |
| Board Of Directors: | Prashant Shukle, Jeff Harris, Patty Mims, Kumar Navulur, Ed Parsons, Faraz Ravi, Velu Sinha, Eric Souléres, Frank Suykens, Javier de la Torre, Rob van de Velde, Steven Witt, Zaffar Sadiq Mohamed-Ghouse, Jen Ziemke |
| Subsidiaries: | OGC-Europe |
| Website: | https://www.ogc.org |
| Formerly: | Open GIS Consortium |
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international voluntary consensus standards organization that develops and maintains international standards for geospatial content and location-based services, sensor web, Internet of Things, GIS data processing and data sharing. The OGC was incorporated as a not for profit in 1994. At that time, the official name was the OpenGIS Consortium. Currently, commercial, government, nonprofit, universities, and research organizations participate in a consensus process encouraging development, maintenance, and implementation of open standards.
A predecessor organization, OGF, the Open GRASS Foundation, started in 1992.[2]
From 1994 to 2004 the organization used the name OpenGIS Consortium.
The OGC website gives a detailed history of the OGC.[3]
Most of the OGC Standards depend on a generalized architecture captured in a set of documents collectively called the Abstract Specification. The topic volumes in the Abstract Specification describe conceptual and logical models for representing geographic features, coverage data, sensors and other geographic phenomena. Atop the Abstract Specification members have developed and continue to develop a growing number of standards to serve specific needs for interoperable location and geospatial technology, including GIS.
The OGC standards baseline comprises more than 80 Standards,[4] including:
Simple Features Access, first approved in 1999, was the first full OGC Standard. Shortly after, a series of standards based on the HTTP web services paradigm for message-based interactions in web-based systems were developed and approved. These are known as the OGC Web Service Standards. These include the Web Map Service Interface Standard and the OGC Web Feature Service Interface Standard. More recently, considerable progress has been made in defining and approving a suite of Web API Standards, such as OGC SensorThings API and the OGC API - Features Standard.
The OGC has several operational units:
In the OGC Standards Program the Technical Committee and Planning Committee[11] work in a formal consensus process to arrive at approved (or "adopted") OGC standards.[12] Learn about the standards that have been approved so far, and see the lists of products[13] that implement these standards.
The OGC Compliance Program provides the resources, procedures, and policies for improving software implementations' compliance with OGC standards. The Compliance Program provides an online free testing facility,[14] a process[15] for certification and branding of compliant products, and community coordination.[16] The Compliance Program also runs plugfests, which are short term events for increasing interoperability among vendors' products.
The OGC and its members offer resources to help technology developers and users take advantage of the OGC's open standards. Technical documents, training materials, test suites, reference implementations and other interoperability resources developed in OGC Interoperability Initiatives are available on our resources page.[17] In addition, the OGC and its members support publications, workshops, seminars and conferences[18] to help technology developers, integrators and procurement managers introduce OGC capabilities into their architectures.
The OGC offers membership options for industry, government, academic, research and not-for-profit organizations.[19]
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.[20]
The OGC works with more than 20 international standards-bodies including W3C, OASIS, WfMC, and the IETF.[21]