OGC Invites Comments on Restructuring Simple Features Standard

Request Open: November 11, 2025 4:11 pm — December 11, 2025 12:00 am (6 days left) (AoE)

November 11, 2025

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) seeks public comment on the proposed restructuring of the OGC Simple Features Standard into a multipart Standard.

OGC Simple Features was the first Standard published by OGC and remains widely used, defining the foundation for geometry and geometric operations. As OGC evolves its Standards baseline to a more modular structure, the Simple Features Standard can also be more optimally published to simplify implementers’ use of the work. Thus, Simple Features is being restructured to a multipart Standard.

The first three parts encompass what is currently published as Simple Feature Access – Part 1: Common Architecture (OGC 06-103r4), also published as ISO 19125-1:2004. This restructuring is backward-compatible with the current version of the Standard and makes no normative changes other than the Annotation Text requirements, which are proposed for deprecation, and that the Coordinate reference BNF description is replaced with a reference to the standalone OGC Topic 2/ISO 19111 and OGC CRS WKB/ISO 19162 documents.

OGC Simple Features – Part 1: Architecture describes the common architecture for simple feature geometry. The simple feature geometry object model is distributed computing platform neutral and uses UML notation. The base Geometry class has subclasses for Point, Curve, Surface, and GeometryCollection. Each geometric object is associated with a Spatial Reference System, which describes the coordinate space in which the geometric object is defined.

OGC Simple Features – Part 2: Well-Known Text Representation of Geometry describes an encoding of Simple Features (per Part 1) in a Well-Known Text (WKT) representation. Each Geometry Type has a Well-Known Text representation that can be used both to construct new instances of the type and to convert existing instances to textual form for alphanumeric display.

OGC Simple Features – Part 3: Well-Known Binary Representation of Geometry describes an encoding of Simple Features (per Part 1) as a Well-Known Binary (WKB) representation. The WKB for Geometry (WKBGeometry) provides a portable representation of a geometric object as a contiguous stream of bytes. WKB permits geometric objects to be exchanged between a client and a service implementation in binary form.

Additional Simple Features parts will be added in the future, including parts for SQL and more advanced geometric operations.

To Comment

The proposed restructuring of the OGC Simple Features Standard is available for review and comment for a period of 30 days. Comments are due by December 11, 2025.

Documents for review:

Comments can be submitted to a dedicated email reflector for a period ending on the “Close request date” listed above. Comments received will be consolidated and reviewed by OGC members for incorporation into the document. Please submit your comments via this email address, using this Comments Template for the message body.

About OGC

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is a membership organization dedicated to using the power of geography and technology to solve problems faced by people and the planet. OGC unlocks value and opportunity for its members through Standards, Innovation, and Collaboration. Our membership represents a diverse and active global community drawn from government, industry, academia, international development agencies, research & scientific organizations, civil society, and advocates.