OGC Consortium

OGC is a not for profit consortium created in 1994 and made up of companies, government agencies and universities with the aim of defining open and interoperable standards that facilitate the exchange of geoinformation between remote platforms.

The entities collaborate together to develop open specifications: technical documents that foster geo-spatial interoperability* and facilitate the collection and management of geoinformation for the benefit of users.

The success of the OpenGIS specifications lies in the fact that they are driven and created by the same companies that will later implement them in their commercial products.

OpenGis specifications

The OGC's willingness with the implementation of the specifications is to create a normative and accessible framework that facilitates the interoperability between the geoinformation servers. The specifications describe a series of standard languages ​​and protocols to be used by the different servers.

In these specifications does not mention nor the architecture, platform or programming languages ​​to use.

These documents, before being considered as an OpenGIS Implementation Specification, are developed and tested by various working groups within the OGC and, finally, put to the vote.

* Interoperability: Ability of two or more systems to exchange information and to be able to use it, without any effort, by the user.