The Open Geospatial Consortium and Web Services Standards

This chapter discusses the role of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) geospatial standards as a key aspect in the development, deployment, and use of Geospatial Web Services. The OGC vision for web services is the complete integration of geographic (location) and time information into the very fabric of both the internet and the web. Today, the Geospatial Web Services encompasses applications ranging from as simple as geo-tagging a photograph to mobile driving directions to sophisticated spatial data infrastructure portal applications orchestrating workflows for complex scientific modeling applications. In all of these applications, location and usually time are required information elements. In many of these applications, standards are the “glue” that allow the easy and seamless integration of location and time in applications - whether simple mass market or integration into enterprise workflows. These standards may be very lightweight, such as GeoRSS, or more sophisticated such as the OGC Web Feature Service (WFS) and Geography Markup Language (GML).