Open Geospatial Consortium


The Open Geospatial Consortium, an international voluntary consensus standards organization, originated in 1994. In the OGC, more than 500 commercial, governmental, nonprofit and research organizations worldwide collaborate in a consensus process encouraging development and implementation of open standards for geospatial content and services, sensor web and Internet of Things, GIS data processing and data sharing.

History

A predecessor organization, OGF, the Open GRASS Foundation, started in 1992.
From 1994 to 2004 the organization also used the name Open GIS Consortium.
The OGC website gives a detailed history of the OGC.

Standards

Most of the OGC standards depend on a generalized architecture captured in a set of documents collectively called the Abstract Specification, which describes a basic data model for representing geographic features. Atop the Abstract Specification members have developed and continue to develop a growing number of specifications, or standards to serve specific needs for interoperable location and geospatial technology, including GIS.
More information here:
The OGC standards baseline comprises more than 30 standards, including:
The design of standards were originally built on the HTTP web services paradigm for message-based interactions in web-based systems, but meanwhile has been extended with a common approach for SOAP protocol and WSDL bindings. Considerable progress has been made in defining Representational State Transfer web services, e.g., OGC SensorThings API.

Organization structure

The OGC has four operational units:

Standards program (SP)

In the OGC Standards Program the Technical Committee and Planning Committee work in a formal consensus process to arrive at approved OGC® standards. Learn about the standards that have been approved so far, and see the lists of products that implement these standards.

Innovation Program (IP)

A global, innovative, hands-on prototyping and testing program designed to accelerate interface development and validation, and bring interoperability to the market. Learn about the different initiatives currently under way, how they are organized, and how you can participate.

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, a process for certification and branding of compliant products, and coordination of a vibrant community that develops and supports test scripts. 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. In addition, the OGC and its members support publications, workshops, seminars and conferences to help technology developers, integrators and procurement managers introduce OGC plug and play capabilities into their architectures.

Membership

The OGC is an open membership organization. The OGC offers a range of membership options for industry, government, academic, research and not-for-profit organizations interested in supporting the Consortium's global mission

Collaboration

The OGC has a close relationship with ISO/TC 211. 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.
The OGC works with more than 20 international standards-bodies including W3C, OASIS, WfMC, and the IETF.