The Open Geospatial Consortium and Web Services Standards

The Open Geospatial Consortium and Web Services Standards

Carl N. Reed
Copyright: © 2011 |Pages: 16
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-192-8.ch001
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Abstract

This chapter discusses the role of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) geospatial standards as a key aspect in the development, deployment, and use of Geospatial Web Services. The OGC vision for web services is the complete integration of geographic (location) and time information into the very fabric of both the internet and the web. Today, the Geospatial Web Services encompasses applications ranging from as simple as geo-tagging a photograph to mobile driving directions to sophisticated spatial data infrastructure portal applications orchestrating workflows for complex scientific modeling applications. In all of these applications, location and usually time are required information elements. In many of these applications, standards are the “glue” that allow the easy and seamless integration of location and time in applications - whether simple mass market or integration into enterprise workflows. These standards may be very lightweight, such as GeoRSS, or more sophisticated such as the OGC Web Feature Service (WFS) and Geography Markup Language (GML).
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Background

This section provides background on the OGC, OGC Web Services, and key terms and definitions.

What is the OGC?

Founded in 1994, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is a global industry consortium with a vision to “Achieve the full societal, economic and scientific benefits of integrating location resources into commercial and institutional processes worldwide”. Inherent in this vision is the requirement for geospatial standards and strategies to be an integral part of business processes.

The OGC consists of 400+ members - geospatial technology software vendors, systems integrators, government agencies and universities - participating in a consensus process to develop, test, and document publicly available geospatial interface standards and encodings for use in information and communications industries.

Open interfaces and protocols defined in OGC standards are designed to support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT, and to empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful to all kinds of applications. As such, the mission of the OGC is to serve as a global forum for the development, promotion and harmonization of open and freely available geospatial standards. Therefore, the OGC also has a major commitment to collaborate with other Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) that have requirements for using location based content. These SDOs include such organizations as ISO1, OASIS2, the IETF3, NENA4, OMA5 and the W3C6.

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