OpenGIS® Standards and Specifications

OpenGIS® Standards and Specifications are technical documents that detail interfaces or encodings. Software developers use these documents to build support for the interfaces or encodings into their products and services. These specifications are the main "products" of the Open Geospatial Consortium and have been developed by the membership to address specific interoperability challenges. Ideally, when specifications are implemented by two different software engineers working independently, the resulting components plug and play, that is they work together without further debugging.

The documents are available at no cost to everyone.

OpenGIS® Standards

Implementation Standards are different from the Abstract Specification. They are written for a more technical audience and detail the interface structure between software components. An interface specification is considered to be at the implementation level of detail if, when implemented by two different software engineers in ignorance of each other, the resulting components plug and play with each other at that interface.

Any Schemas (xsd, xslt, etc) that support an approved Implementation Standard can be found in the official OGC Schema Repository.

Abstract Specification

The OGC Technical Committee (TC) has developed an architecture in support of its vision of geospatial technology and data interoperability called the OpenGIS Abstract Specification. The Abstract Specification provides the conceptual foundation for most OGC specification development activities. Open interfaces and protocols are built and referenced against the Abstract Specification, thus enabling interoperability between different brands and different kinds of spatial processing systems. The Abstract Specification provides a reference model for the development of OpenGIS Implementation Specifications.

OpenGIS® Reference Model (ORM)

The OpenGIS® Reference Model (ORM) provides a framework for the ongoing work of the OGC. The ORM describes the OGC Standards Baseline (SB) focusing on the relationships between the OpenGIS Specificationdocuments. The OGC SB consists of the approved OpenGIS® Abstract and Implementation Specifications as well as OGC Best Practices documents. Best Practices documents are official positions of the OGC membership and quite often are provided as supporting technical information for the adopted Specifications.

Best Practices Documents

Documents containing discussion of best practices related to the use and/or implementation of an adopted OGC document and for release to the public. Best Practices Documents are an official position of the OGC and thus represent an endorsement of the content of the paper. Schemas for some of these documents can be at the Best Practices Schema Repository.

Discussion Papers

Documents that present technology issues being considered in the Working Groups of the Open Geospatial Consortium Technical Committee. Their purpose is to create discussion in the geospatial information industry on a specific topic. Discussion papers are not intended to be targets of acquisition descriptions. These papers do not represent the official position of the Open Geospatial Consortium nor of the OGC Technical Committee. Schemas for some of these documents can be at the Discussion Paper Schema Repository .

White Papers