25 February 2013 – The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has adopted”Semanticannotations in OGC standards” as an OGC Best Practice.
OGC standards provide standard ways of locating and transportingnetwork-resident geospatial data and ways of locating and invoking geospatial services.Without proper descriptions of these resources, however, use of the resourcesis limited to small user groups. To make a geospatial resource more widely discoverable,assessable and useful, resource providers must annotate the resource withdescriptive metadata that can be read and understood by a broad audience. Withoutsuch metadata, people will neither be able to find the resource using searchengines nor will they be able to evaluate if the discovered resource satisfiestheir current information need.
This OGC Best Practice explains preferred methods of providingsemantic annotation in OGC Web Service environments. It explains how to use theOGC Capabilities-Document and descriptions of feature types, coverages andprocesses to publish, discover, access, invoke, and finally visualize spatialdata. It extends existing OGC standards and applies standards from otherorganizations such as the W3C to OGC Standards.
The OGC is an international consortium of more than 480 companies,government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating ina consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGCStandards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web,wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empowertechnology developers to make geospatial information and services accessibleand useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visitthe OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.
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