Standards-based Web Development >

Page 3 of 11

Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC)

In order to develop and/or adopt common international standards, GeoConnections and the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure rely on the work of both the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC).

The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) is an international industry consortium of over 250 companies, government agencies and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface specifications.

OGC began in 1994 in an effort to create a technical committee that would agree on open interfaces for network interoperability of geospatial systems. Since then, vendors have participated in specification development programs to promote interoperability in geospatial data access and applications.

OGC has concentrated its efforts in the following areas:

The encoding of information in software systems (data format standards and data transfer standards);
The naming of features and feature relationships (data dictionaries);
Schemas for descriptions of data sets (metadata).

As a sponsor, GeoConnections contributes to the development of specifications by OGC members. In return, GeoConnections endorses OGC’s specifications for the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure. This provides the CGDI with a comprehensive set of geospatial specifications that can act as a foundation for interoperable services within the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure and with other compliant services provided outside the CGDI.

Click on the numbers below to learn more.

Before you start

It’s important to understand the difference between a standard and a specification.

From an OGC point of view, there are several similarities between them. Both specifications and standards are documents written for software engineers and are designed to convey the consensus of their proponents. Both types of documents address issues such as formats, protocols, encodings, schema, file transfer, access, quality, and other aspects of information and process sharing, and provide guidance to the engineer on software design and behaviour.

There are also several differences. The authority of a specification rests on its inherent technical excellence and on the breadth of its acceptance in the marketplace. On the other hand, the authority of a standard derives from the authority of the standard-setting organization sponsoring it.

From an OGC point of view, many standards are written at an “abstract” level. That is, they are open to some interpretation, and two different software engineers would probably implement them in different ways. OpenGIS® specifications are focused not just on the interfaces between components of a common GIS-enabled environment, but also upon providing sufficiently detailed models, structures and behaviours to the software engineer so that his/her implementation interoperates with those from other implementers. (OGC newsletter, January 30, 2003)

Page 3 of 11