5 May 2015 – The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) membership has adopted the OGC Well-known Text (WKT) Representation of Coordinate Reference Systems Encoding Standard.
Well-Known Text (WKT), specified several years ago in the OGC and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard, “Geographic information – Simple feature access – Part 1: Common architecture”, describes a compact machine- and human-readable representation of geometric objects. The newly announced standard revises the earlier WKT specification to be consistent with OGC Abstract Specification Topic 2 and ISO 19111:2007 – Spatial referencing by coordinates. It also extends the content to include coordinate transformation definitions.
The text strings specified in the new standard provide a means for humans and machines to correctly and unambiguously interpret and utilise a coordinate reference system definition. Look-ups or external references are necessary only to define coordinate operation mathematics.
The Well-known Text Representation of Coordinate Reference Systems Encoding Standard was prepared by the Open Geospatial Consortium jointly with ISO Technical Committee ISO/TC 211, Geographic information/Geomatics. The document will also be published as ISO 19162.
The OGC Well-known Text (WKT) Representation of Coordinate Reference Systems Encoding Standard is available at http://docs.opengeospatial.org/is/12-063r5/12-063r5.html.
The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 500 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/
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