OGC - The Organization

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international industry consortium of more than 500 companies, government agencies and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available standards. Standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services and mainstream IT. The standards empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful with all kinds of applications.Requirements range from complex scheduling and control of Earth observation satellites to displaying simple map images on the Web and encoding location with just a few bytes for geo-tagging and messaging.

Technical Committee

The OGC Technical Committee provides an open, collaborative forum for professional discussion related to the consensus development and/or evaluation, approval, and revision of OGC international standards. It is composed of the Chair, representatives of all member organizations of the OGC; and other individuals deemed appropriate by the OGC Board of Directors or the Planning Committee.

Domain Working Groups

Domain Working Groups (DWG or WG) provide a forum for discussion of key interoperability requirements and issues, discussion and review of implementation specifications, and presentations on key technology areas relevant to solving geospatial interoperability issues.

A look at the OGC Domain Working Groups shows the wide scope of current activity in the OGC. Some examples of DWGs include the:

  • Defense and Intelligence DWG

  • Emergency and Disaster Management DWG

  • Interoperable Simulation and Gaming DWG

Standards Working Groups

Standards Working Groups (SWG) have specific charter of working on a candidate standard prior to approval as an OGC standard or on making revisions to an existing OGC standard. Some examples of SWGs include the:

  • GeoPackage SWG

  • GMLJP2 SWG

  • GeoTIFF SWG

OGC Naming Authority Sub-Committee

The primary role of the OGC Naming Authority (OGC-NA) is to ensure an orderly process for assigning URIs for OGC resources, such as OGC documents, standards, XML namespaces, ontologies.

Compliance Interoperability & Testing Evaluation (CITE) Sub-Committee

The CITE Subcommittee provides guidance to and advise the OGC staff on the operation of the Compliance and Interoperability Testing and Evaluation Program (CITE) of the Consortium.