The Open Geospatial Consortium, or OGC, is an international voluntary consensus standards organization. In the OGC, more than 300 commercial, governmental, nonprofit and research organisations worldwide, collaborate in an open consensus process encouraging development and implementation of standards for geospatial content and services, GIS data processing and exchange. It was previously known as Open GIS Consortium. This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... A geographic information system or geographical information system (GIS) is a system for creating and managing spatial data and associated attributes. ... Data processing is any computer process that converts data into information. ...

Based on the so-called abstract specification - describing a basic data model for geographic features to be represented - an increasing number of specifications are developed to serve specific needs for interoperable location and geospatial technology, including GIS. Physical map of the Earth (Medium) (Large 2 MB) Geography is the scientific study of the locational and spatial variation in both physical and human phenomena on Earth. ... Interoperability can be defined in a technical way or in a broad way, taking into account social, political and organizational factors. ...

The most important OGC specifications:

• WMS - Web Map Service
• WFS - Web Feature Service
• WCS - Web Coverage Service
• CAT - Web Catalog Service
• SFS - Simple Features - SQL
• GML - Geography Markup Language

These are primarily designed around the REST paradigm for message-based interactions in web-based systems. Introduction An OGC Web Map Service (WMS) produces maps of spatially referenced data dynamically from geographic information. ... The Web Feature Service (WFS) is an interface allowing requests for geographical features across the web being highly interoperable. ... Web Coverage Service (WCS) The Web Coverage Service extends the Web Map Server interface to allow access to geospatial coverages containing values or properties of geographic locations, rather than static maps (server-rendered as pictures). ... The OGC Catalog Service defines common interfaces to discover, browse, and query metadata about data, services, and other potential resources. ... Simple Features are an OpenGIS standard which specifies digital storage of geographical data (point, line, polygon, multi-point, multi-line, etc) with both spatial and non-spatial attributes. ... The Geography Markup Language (GML) is the XML grammar defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to express geographical features. ... Rest has several different meanings. ... Since the late 1800s, the word paradigm (IPA: ) has referred to a thought pattern in any scientific discipline or other epistemological context. ...

OGC has a close relationship with ISO/TC 211 (Geographic Information/Geomatics). The OGC abstract specification is being progressively replaced by volumes from the ISO 19100 series under development by this committee. A standard technical committee formed within ISO. Its scope is: Standardization in the field of digital geographic information. ...

See also

• GPS
• GeoTools - Implements all OGC standards as they are released

Over fifty GPS satellites such as this NAVSTAR have been launched since 1978. ... This article is being considered for deletion in accordance with Wikipedias deletion policy. ...

External links

• Open Geospatial Consortium
• Open GPSToolKit.
• ISO/TC 211
• OGR - OGR library which implements relevant OGC standards
• Open Source Geospatial Foundation - which actively promotes free and open standards
• Open Source GIS Master Index of Open Source GIS projects, many of which implement OGC standards