Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC)

1/01/2005
(Original Publish Date: 2000)

The Open GIS Consortium is an international industry standards consortium of more than 250 companies, government agencies and universities. Members participate in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface specifications that support interoperable solutions that make the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream information technology map friendly. The most widely adopted OGC specifications deal with maps in a Web Services environment. In particular, they deal with how to make map data (maps or the data that makes up maps) and map services (answering a map-related question) Web-accessible no matter the underlying hardware, software or network.