Open Geospatial Consortium

Last updated
Open Geospatial Consortium
AbbreviationOGC
Formation1994;30 years ago (1994)
Type Standards organization
Membership
470+ member organizations [1]
Chief Executive Officer
Peter Rabley
Chief Technology Innovation Officer
Ingo Simonis
Chief Standards Officer
Scott Simmons
Operational Chief Financial Officer
Mitzi Osterhout
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 called
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.

Contents

History

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]

Standards

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.


Relationship between clients/servers and OGC protocols GeoServer GeoNetwork with web app.svg
Relationship between clients/servers and OGC protocols

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.

Organization structure

The OGC has several operational units:

Standards program (SP)

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.

Compliance Program (CP)

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.

Community and Outreach Program (COP)

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.

Membership

The OGC offers membership options for industry, government, academic, research and not-for-profit organizations. [19]

Collaboration

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]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geography Markup Language</span> XML grammar for geographical features

The Geography Markup Language (GML) is the XML grammar defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to express geographical features. GML serves as a modeling language for geographic systems as well as an open interchange format for geographic transactions on the Internet. Key to GML's utility is its ability to integrate all forms of geographic information, including not only conventional "vector" or discrete objects, but coverages and sensor data.

A coverage is the digital representation of some spatio-temporal phenomenon. ISO 19123 provides the definition:

In computing, the Open Geospatial Consortium Web Feature Service (WFS) Interface Standard provides an interface allowing requests for geographical features across the web using platform-independent calls. One can think of geographical features as the "source code" behind a map, whereas the WMS interface or online tiled mapping portals like Google Maps return only an image, which end-users cannot edit or spatially analyze. The XML-based GML furnishes the default payload-encoding for transporting geographic features, but other formats like shapefiles can also serve for transport. In early 2006 the OGC members approved the OpenGIS GML Simple Features Profile. This profile is designed both to increase interoperability between WFS servers and to improve the ease of implementation of the WFS standard.

A GIS file format is a standard for encoding geographical information into a computer file, as a specialized type of file format for use in geographic information systems (GIS) and other geospatial applications. Since the 1970s, dozens of formats have been created based on various data models for various purposes. They have been created by government mapping agencies, GIS software vendors, standards bodies such as the Open Geospatial Consortium, informal user communities, and even individual developers.

In computing, GeoServer is an open-source server written in Java that allows users to share, process and edit geospatial data. Designed for interoperability, it publishes data from any major spatial data source using open standards. GeoServer has evolved to become an easy method of connecting existing information to virtual globes such as Google Earth and NASA World Wind as well as to web-based maps such as OpenLayers, Leaflet, Google Maps and Bing Maps. GeoServer functions as the reference implementation of the Open Geospatial Consortium Web Feature Service standard, and also implements the Web Map Service, Web Coverage Service and Web Processing Service specifications.

A GIS software program is a computer program to support the use of a geographic information system, providing the ability to create, store, manage, query, analyze, and visualize geographic data, that is, data representing phenomena for which location is important. The GIS software industry encompasses a broad range of commercial and open-source products that provide some or all of these capabilities within various information technology architectures.

Simple Features is a set of standards that specify a common storage and access model of geographic features made of mostly two-dimensional geometries used by geographic databases and geographic information systems. It is formalized by both the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

Catalogue Service for the Web (CSW), sometimes seen as Catalogue Service - Web, is a standard for exposing a catalogue of geospatial records in XML on the Internet. The catalogue is made up of records that describe geospatial data, geospatial services, and related resources.

A spatial database is a general-purpose database that has been enhanced to include spatial data that represents objects defined in a geometric space, along with tools for querying and analyzing such data.

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), is a non-profit non-governmental organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. The foundation was formed in February 2006 to provide financial, organizational and legal support to the broader Libre/Free and open-source geospatial community. It also serves as an independent legal entity to which community members can contribute code, funding and other resources.

Oracle Spatial and Graph, formerly Oracle Spatial, is a free option component of the Oracle Database. The spatial features in Oracle Spatial and Graph aid users in managing geographic and location-data in a native type within an Oracle database, potentially supporting a wide range of applications — from automated mapping, facilities management, and geographic information systems (AM/FM/GIS), to wireless location services and location-enabled e-business. The graph features in Oracle Spatial and Graph include Oracle Network Data Model (NDM) graphs used in traditional network applications in major transportation, telcos, utilities and energy organizations and RDF semantic graphs used in social networks and social interactions and in linking disparate data sets to address requirements from the research, health sciences, finance, media and intelligence communities.

Well-known text (WKT) is a text markup language for representing vector geometry objects. A binary equivalent, known as well-known binary (WKB), is used to transfer and store the same information in a more compact form convenient for computer processing but that is not human-readable. The formats were originally defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and described in their Simple Feature Access. The current standard definition is in the ISO/IEC 13249-3:2016 standard.

Geospatial metadata is a type of metadata applicable to geographic data and information. Such objects may be stored in a geographic information system (GIS) or may simply be documents, data-sets, images or other objects, services, or related items that exist in some other native environment but whose features may be appropriate to describe in a (geographic) metadata catalog.

Cadcorp Limited is a British owned and run company established in 1991. Cadcorp has its headquarters in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, U.K. Cadcorp has a network of distributors and value added resellers (VARs) around the world.

The Open Geospatial Consortium Web Coverage Service Interface Standard (WCS) defines Web-based retrieval of coverages – that is, digital geospatial information representing space/time-varying phenomena.

GeoAPI is free software providing a set of Java interfaces for GIS applications. GeoAPI interfaces are derived from the abstract model and concrete specifications published collaboratively by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in its 19100 series of documents and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) in its abstract and implementation specifications. GeoAPI provides an interpretation and adaptation of these standards to match the constraints and usages of the target programming language. The international standards translated to Java interfaces are:

The Sensor Observation Service (SOS) is a web service to query real-time sensor data and sensor data time series and is part of the Sensor Web. The offered sensor data consists of data directly from the sensors, which are encoded in the Sensor Model Language (SensorML), and the measured values in the Observations and Measurements encoding format. The web service as well as both file formats are open standards and specifications of the same name defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).

The Web Coverage Processing Service (WCPS) defines a language for filtering and processing of multi-dimensional raster coverages, such as sensor, simulation, image, and statistics data. The Web Coverage Processing Service is maintained by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). This raster query language allows clients to obtain original coverage data, or derived information, in a platform-neutral manner over the Web.

GeoSPARQL is a model for representing and querying geospatial linked data for the Semantic Web. It is standardized by the Open Geospatial Consortium as OGC GeoSPARQL. The definition of a small ontology based on well-understood OGC standards is intended to provide a standardized exchange basis for geospatial RDF data which can support both qualitative and quantitative spatial reasoning and querying with the SPARQL database query language.

SensorThings API is an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard providing an open and unified framework to interconnect IoT sensing devices, data, and applications over the Web. It is an open standard addressing the syntactic interoperability and semantic interoperability of the Internet of Things. It complements the existing IoT networking protocols such CoAP, MQTT, HTTP, 6LowPAN. While the above-mentioned IoT networking protocols are addressing the ability for different IoT systems to exchange information, OGC SensorThings API is addressing the ability for different IoT systems to use and understand the exchanged information. As an OGC standard, SensorThings API also allows easy integration into existing Spatial Data Infrastructures or Geographic Information Systems.

References

  1. ↑ "OGC – current Members". OGC. Retrieved 17 July 2016.
  2. ↑ GRASS Roots, Westervelt, p. 5
  3. ↑ "OGC History (detailed) | OGC". www.ogc.org.
  4. ↑ "OGC Standards and Supporting Documents | OGC". www.ogc.org.
  5. ↑ "GeoPackage – GeoPackage Encoding Standard" . Retrieved 2021-05-31.
  6. ↑ "OGC Standard – GeoPose 1.0 Data Exchange Standard".
  7. ↑ "GeoSPARQL – A Geographic Query Language for RDF Data" . Retrieved 2012-11-25.
  8. ↑ "OGC Standard – Sensor Observation Service". 2008. Retrieved 2008-10-29.
  9. ↑ "OGC Standard – Sensor Planning Service". 2010. Retrieved 2010-04-14.
  10. ↑ "OGC Standard – SensorThings API". 2015. Retrieved 2015-11-03.
  11. ↑ "Groups & Committees | OGC". www.ogc.org.
  12. ↑ "OGC® Standards and Supporting Documents | OGC". www.ogc.org.
  13. ↑ "Certified and Implementing Products | OGC". www.ogc.org.
  14. ↑ "TEAM Engine". cite.opengeospatial.org.
  15. ↑ "Compliance Testing | OGC". www.ogc.org.
  16. ↑ "opengeospatial/cite". GitHub.
  17. ↑ "OGC Resources | OGC". Archived from the original on 2017-10-05. Retrieved 2019-09-06.
  18. ↑ "Events List - times on this page are GMT | OGC". www.ogc.org.
  19. ↑ "Membership Levels | OGC". www.ogc.org.
  20. ↑ "OGC Web Feature Service Standard accepted as ISO Standard". 2011.
  21. ↑ "OGC's Role in the Spatial Standards World".
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