Advancing Geospatial Innovation Together
Through OGC’s Standards Program, members and communities work together to identify, develop, and refine open geospatial standards — ensuring seamless data sharing and interoperability worldwide.
Building a shared foundation for innovation and insight.
The Benefits of Our Standards Program
Engage in our Standards program to help identify, develop and advance geospatial standards.
Identifying Standards
Domain Working Groups (DWGs) identify future standard needs. They’re a great place to start formulating your ideas to promote standards.
Adopting Standards
OGC members convene Standards Working Groups (SWGs) to prepare candidate standards for approval as OGC Standards. SWGs also revise existing OGC Standards. Any OGC Member can vote in the SWGs or DWGs. SWGs send the documents to be voted on by the Technical Committee. Only Catalyst, Principal and Strategic Members can vote at the Technical Committee stage.
Community Standards can be submitted to the OGC for endorsement. They can be brought forward by any OGC Member. Community Standards serve two purposes:
- to bring de facto standards from the larger geospatial community to be a stable reference point that can normatively referenced by governments and other organizations; and
- to bring new, but implemented, standards to the OGC to form the basis for further refinement and development of interoperability between other OGC standards.
Moving a Community Standard through the OGC process takes approximately 6–9 months compared to 18–24 months for a Full OGC Standard.
Revising Standards
OGC Members can comment on and make suggestions to Standards whether they are in development or have already been adopted. As part of OGC’s consensus-based approach, standards are open for public comment. Comments are submitted to the Issues board on a SWG’s GitHub repository up to the ‘close request date’ listed on the announcement page. Comments are then consolidated and reviewed by OGC members. You can subscribe to the Issues board on a SWG’s GitHub repository to receive comments as they are submitted. Subscribing to the Issues board will also allow you to view comments already received. OGC maintains a list of the archived comments it has received. OGC Members can suggest revisions to existing standards using an OGC Change Request Proposal (CRP). These can include issues logged in the SWG’s collaboration environment (GitHub or GitLab) or via Change Requests logged in the OGC CIO Standards Tracker.
Advancing Standards
OGC runs community events that bring together developers and interested parties in a collaborative coding environment to advance the use of standards across the geospatial domain. These include:
- Code Sprints – The focus of these three-day events is on implementing and advancing a standard specification. For newcomers, they provide a way of getting familiar with the specification and attend mentor streams offering guided tutorials. Code sprints cover all OGC Standards.
- Developer Workshops – Developer Workshops are held at the same time as OGC member meetings. They focus on a few selected standards and provide an overview of the specification as well as practical demonstrations.
- Outreach Days – On the last Thursday of every month we hold an informal virtual meeting to hack, document and discuss. It’s a chance to connect with our awesome OGC community. The agenda is set by the community. For dates of upcoming events please visit here.
All these events are open to the general public. Non-members can attend Developer Workshops by paying the applicable registration fee.
Open Calls and Requests
Members of the public can review candidate standards and share feedback to ensure they are practical and widely applicable.
Request For Comment (RFC)
OGC Seeks Public Comment on Candidate OGC SensorThings API Extension: WebSub Asynchronous Messaging Standard