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Meeting the Requirements of Domain Groups
Introduction
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international voluntary consensus standards organization that was founded in 1994. In the OGC, more than 475 commercial, governmental, nonprofit and research organizations worldwide collaborate in a consensus process encouraging development and implementation of open standards for geospatial content and services, GIS data processing, location services, sensors, and data modeling.
Although the organization itself has changed over the years, OGC's initial mission was to get past proprietary data formats so that users and technology providers could more easily share geospatial data, without giving up their proprietary formats or specific spatial database technologies. Instead, they can expose geospatial data through standard interfaces and formats, says Dr. Carl Reed is the Chief Technology Officer at the Open Geospatial Consortium.
Simple Features (SFS), Web Map Service (WMS) and the Sensor Web Enablement
Reed: "the first few years of the OGC were spent on defining a common vocabulary and language. Back in 1994, there were no common international definitions of concepts as polygons, lines, points or features. The OGC members had to work long and hard to define terms, definitions, and semantics. We did much of this work jointly with ISO-TC 211. After the first couple of years we were finally ready to define a service interface that would provide a client with the ability to make a standard request to a spatial database and get a standard response back."
OGC's first standard came out in 1 998 and was very successful: Simple Features, (officially Simple Feature Access). SFA specifies a common storage model of mostly twodimensional geographical data. Reed: "SFA defines a tightly coupled API. Right now just about every open source database and commercial database that works with spatial data implements Simple Features. Shortly after SFA was approved as an OGC standard, the OGC submitted the specification to ISO TC 21 1 to become an ISO standard."
By 1996, a whole new paradigm emerged for user access to geospatial services and content: the Web. With this came new technology such as web services and lightweight clients providing access to data and services. In 1998, the OGC members agreed to shift from tightly coupled APIs to working with a web services environment. Reed: "The...