Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is a nonprofit international voluntary consortium of more than 370 private companies, government agencies, and academic institutions that develop publicly available, consensus-based interface specifications and interoperability standards for geospatial data. Interoperability—the ability of different systems to transparently exchange geo-spatial data—became a pressing concern to GIS users in the 1990s. To solve interoperability problems, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers developed the open-source GIS software the Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS) in the early 1990s, but open systems by themselves did not prove to be a complete solution. Members of the GRASS community formed the OGC in 1994 with the vision of allowing users to access geospatial data created by others regardless of the software used.

Since its establishment, OGC has focused on developing standards for geographic information exchange. These standards are open, that is, they are technology neutral, developed by a participatory process, and with free rights of distribution.

The OGC develops standards by two methods. The Specification Program develops standards in a formal process requiring member approval. This program collaborates with the International Standards Organization and the Federal Geographic Data Committee. The Interoperability Program is a test bed activity in which a rapid, coordinated test is performed on a proposed interface standard in an open environment to refine solutions for OGC specifications.

The OGC has developed the Open GIS Abstract Specification, a suite of conceptual models to guide development of individual implementation specifications. The abstract specification includes topics such as spatial referencing, locational geometry, metadata, earth imagery, and so on. The OGC has released several widely adopted implementation standards that specify encodings for the request of raster coverages, features, and maps from distributed servers over the Internet. The OGC has also adopted Google's Keyhole Markup Language (KML) as a standard for users to create annotations and visualizations for online and mobile maps and Earth browsers.

The OGC has provided support for interoperability test beds, for example, a 2008 Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure interoperability project whose main objective was to test how open standards could improve collaboration among data producers and users from Canada's local, provincial, and national governments; nongovernmental organizations; and private companies.

Semantic interoperability, that is, a means for assessing the content and meaning of items encountered on the Web, is an important enabling technology for the next generation Internet. In 2006, the OGC conducted an experimental project on geospatial ontology and is developing an ontology framework and reference model.