The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is most pleased that you want to mention the organization, its work or its standards in your press release or article. The material below is intended to help you do that easily and accurately. We encourage you to allow us to review your piece before publication. Please send any requests to com.request@opengeospatial.org.
OGC staff love providing quotes supporting and describing the great work we do as a consortium. We do ask that if you would like to quote our staff in your publication please do seek the approval of the Executive Director for Communication and Outreach prior to publication. You can contact them at com.request@opengeospatial.org. The same approval requirements apply to the use of OGC images.
Some years ago, OGC changed its name from the “Open GIS Consortium” to the “Open Geospatial Consortium”. We also no longer include “Inc” at the end of the organisaion name. Please be sure to refer to the organization as the Open Geospatial Consortium. Also, be sure to define the acronym before using OGC in the rest of a document, and please use ‘OGC’ not ‘The OGC’.
Each OGC standard has a full name, for example, the OGC® Web Map Service Interface Standard. (Note that while the name of the organization is no longer Open GIS Consortium, and while we now refer to our “adopted specifications” as “OGC Standards,” the standards are still refered to as OpenGIS specifications in some older documents.) Use the “®” symbol after the first use of OGC in a document. OGC, Open GIS and OpenGIS are all registered trademarks of the OGC.
Be sure to check the name of the standard, as some have changed. In doubt? Check here.
A software product may be only be called compliant to an OGC standard if it has passed an OGC compliance test under direct OGC staff supervision and the product vendor has paid a trademark license fee to OGC. Once that process is complete, the product is listed here as compliant. It is not correct to say that a product is simply compliant – you must indicate to which specification and which version, as in “This product is compliant with the OGC® Web Map Service (WMS) Interface Standard, version 1.3.”
If you want to refer to a product that implements a specification, but has not met the requirements for compliance, you may say that the product implements one or more specifications: example “Product X implements the OGC® Web Map Service (WMS) Interface Standard version 1.3 and the OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding Standard version 3.2.1.”
We use this 138 word “boilerplate” description of OGC and what it does. You are welcome to use it in your articles and press releases.
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is a collective problem-solving community of experts from more than 500 businesses, government agencies, research organizations, and universities driven to make geospatial (location) information and services FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.
The global OGC Community engages in a mix of activities related to location-based technologies: developing consensus-based open standards and best-practice; collaborating on agile innovation initiatives; engaging in community meetings, events, and workshops; and more.
OGC’s unique standards development process moves at the pace of innovation, with constant input from technology forecasting, practical prototyping, real-world testing, and community engagement.
OGC bridges disparate sectors, domains, and technology trends, and encourages the cross-pollination of ideas between different communities of practice to improve decision-making at all levels. OGC is committed to creating an inclusive and sustainable future.
Visit ogc.org for more info on our work.
A shorter 70 word version is:
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international consortium of more than 500 businesses, government agencies, research organizations, and universities driven to make geospatial (location) information and services FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. The global OGC Community engages in a mix of activities related to location-based technologies: developing consensus-based open standards and best-practice; collaborating on agile innovation initiatives; engaging in community meetings, events, and workshops; and more.
Visit ogc.org.
And a pithy 50 word version is:
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international consortium of 500+ businesses, government agencies, research organizations, and universities making location information and services FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable – by creating free geospatial standards and best practices, and practical innovative solutions to members’ real-world data integration problems.
Visit ogc.org.
NOTE: For the current number of OGC Members, please see About OGC.
Members of the press are granted permission to use the logos only in conjunction with stories relating to the OGC. Compliance and membership logos can only be used on products and by organizations with appropriate credentials.
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