Open Geospatial Consortium

Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) and OSGeo are distinctive organizations with individual goals and visions. This page describes the OGC, an organization dedicated to developing Standards for the geospatial realm. In December 2008 OSGeo and the OGC have singed a Memorandum of Understanding to coordinate in advancing open geospatial standards (OGC's mission) and Open Source geospatial software and data (OSGeo's mission).

OGC Logo

About OGC

From http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc:

The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc (OGC) is an international industry consortium of 346 companies, government agencies and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface specifications. OpenGIS® Specifications support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. The specifications empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful with all kinds of applications.

Vision

From: http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/vision

Realization of the full societal, economic and scientific benefits of integrating electronic location resources into commercial and institutional processes worldwide.

Mission

To serve as a global forum for the collaboration of developers and users of spatial data products and services, and to advance the development of international standards for geospatial interoperability. Strategic Goals:

Goal 1 - Provide free and openly available standards to the market, tangible value to Members, and measurable benefits to users.

Goal 2 - Lead worldwide in the creation and establishment of standards that allow geospatial content and services to be seamlessly integrated into business and civic processes, the spatial web and enterprise computing.

Goal 3 - Facilitate the adoption of open, spatially enabled reference architectures in enterprise environments worldwide.

Goal 4 - Advance standards in support of the formation of new and innovative markets and applications for geospatial technologies.

Goal 5 - Accelerate market assimilation of interoperability research through collaborative consortium processes.

History

The early history of the OGC is closely related to the Open Source software GRASS. Read more on the OGC website at: http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/history.

Sites

The OGC operates several web sites, portals and Wikis, each with specific access regulations:

• The main web site http://www.opengeospatial.org/ gives access to all public standards.
• Internal documents can be accessed by members through the portal http://portal.opengeospatial.org/ after authentication.
• On the inside the OGC is structured into Standard Working Groups (SWG) and Domain Working Groups (DWG). Members of the OGC can opt into SWG to contribute to the work. Due to patent regulations the work in the SWG is limited to members of the group. Before a standard becomes official it is openly published for a period of comments.
• OGC Network http://www.ogcnetwork.net/ is an outward facing portal where information from Technical Committee Meetings is published for non-members. As a service to OSGeo we will provide more information on the OGC News page.
• Compliance & Interoperability Testing & Evaluation Initiative
• All OGC reference implementations are based on Open Source Software,
  • GeoNetwork opensource (Graduated OSGeo Project)
  • deegree (Graduated OSGeo Project)
  • GeoServer (currently in OSGeo Incubator)