OGC Web Services Standards

Introduction

Standards are a fundamental enabling technology of the Internet. Standards allow thousands of applications, vendor solutions, and technologies to be interoperable. The Internet, via standards, is vendor and content-neutral. A standard describes requirements and recommendations that have been agreed to in a consensus forum, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), or the OGC. To be useful, standards should represent the “best engineering practices” providing technical value, both in enhancement of individual products, and the multiplicative factor of enabling multiple separate applications from different vendors to operate as one solution.

In the OGC context, a standard is an agreed specification of rules and guidelines about how to implement software interfaces and data encodings. Geospatial software vendors, developers and users collaborate in the OGC’s consensus process to develop and agree on standards that enable information systems to exchange geospatial information and instructions for geoprocessing. OGC standards are open standards. The OGC defines Open Standards as standards that are:

  1. Freely and publicly available – They are available free of charge and unencumbered by patents and other intellectual property.
  2. Non discriminatory – They are available to anyone, any organization, any time, anywhere with no restrictions.
  3. No license fees - There are no charges at any time for their use.
  4. Vendor neutral - They are vendor neutral in terms of their content and implementation concept and do not favor any vendor over another.
  5. Data neutral – The standards are independent of any data storage model or format.
  6. Based on Consensus - They are defined, documented, and approved by a formal, member driven consensus process. The consensus group remains in charge of changes and no single entity controls the standard.

This set of exercises focuses on the use of OGC Standard specification. We will first take on the role of a user and as such will be consuming services. This will be done through the creation and execution of a number of service request using one of OGC's visualization standards, the Web Map Service or WMS for short; and one of OGC's data access standards, the Web Feature Service or WFS. That means working from the right-hand side of 1 as a client. Next, we will take the role of data producer and will develop and test a set of services that are compliant with the WMS and WFS OGC standard specifications. In this part we will then be working from the left-hand side of 1 as data producers. Both the WMS and the WFS work based on the same principles or using the same architecture. 1 shows the principle on which these services are based.

1 - OGC Architecture Diagram »