Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)

The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC), is a member-driven, nonprofit, international, voluntary, [Page 330]consensus standards organization. The OGC, like the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is also termed a standardssetting organization (SSO). A consortium is a combination or group of organizations formed to undertake a common objective that is beyond the resources or capabilities of any single organization. The mission of the OGC is to serve as a global forum for the collaboration of developers and users of geospatial data products (content) and services and to advance the development of common standards that enable geospatial interoperability, the geospatial Web, and the integration of geospatial content and services into enterprise applications.

A consensus standards process must include elements of openness and public review, balanced participation among interest groups, and due process and appeals for aggrieved parties. A key component of the OGC process is to provide a consistent and rigorous intellectual property review to ensure to the best of our ability that all standards developed by the OGC are royalty free and publicly available on a nondiscriminatory basis. The OGC Bylaws and the OGC Technical Committee Policies and Procedures provide the official governance structure for the OGC standards development process.

The OGC was formed in 1994 and has grown to a membership of over 320 commercial, government, university, research, and nongovernmental organizations from 37 countries. The OGC is structured into three main operational units: the Interoperability Program, the Specification Program, and Outreach and Community Adoption.

The Specification Program is overseen by the technical committee and the planning committee. The planning committee is charged with business planning, helping to set market direction for the standards work, and providing oversight of the consortium's technology release process. The planning committee also approves special memberships—such as those with other standards organizations—and committee participation. The technical committee is where the formal standards consensus discussion and approval process occurs. The primary product of the technical committee is the processing and adoption of OGC standards (also known as specifications), which are often drafted and tested in the OGC Interoperability Program. The technical committee is also responsible for the maintenance and revision of our adopted standards.

The OGC produced its first publicly available standard in 1997. This is the OpenGIS™ Simple Features Specification, which specifies the interface operations and requirements for a client to access geospatial data from a database in a standardized way. Since then, the OGC members have developed and approved 17 publicly available standards. The two most commonly known are the Web Map Service Implementation Specification (WMS) and the Geography Markup Language (GML), both released in 2000. A number of OGC standards have also become International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards.

The OGC works closely with other standards organizations, such as the W3C, ISO, and OASIS, to ensure that OGC standards are complementary with current best practices in information technology and to ensure that other standards organizations that require the use of geospatial content and services use the work of the OGC.

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