How can you use OGC standards for better spatial data integration?

1 What are OGC standards?

OGC stands for Open Geospatial Consortium, an international organization that develops and promotes voluntary consensus standards for geospatial data and services. OGC standards aim to facilitate the interoperability, sharing, and reuse of geospatial information across different platforms, applications, and domains. OGC standards cover various aspects of geospatial data, such as formats, interfaces, protocols, metadata, quality, and processing.

2 Why use OGC standards?

Using OGC standards can offer many benefits for spatial data integration, such as reducing the need for data conversion and transformation, enhancing the compatibility and consistency of data from different sources, and enabling the discovery, access, and exchange of spatial data and services. Furthermore, OGC standards support the analysis, visualization, and decision-making based on multiple sources and domains. Finally, these standards can foster innovation and collaboration in the geospatial community by promoting open and interoperable standards.

3 What are the types of OGC standards?

OGC standards can be classified into three main types: abstract specifications, implementation standards, and best practices. Abstract specifications define the conceptual models and principles for geospatial data and services, such as the OGC Abstract Specification Topic 1: Feature Geometry. Implementation standards specify the technical details and requirements for implementing geospatial data and services, such as the OGC GeoPackage Encoding Standard. Best practices provide guidance and recommendations for using geospatial data and services, such as the OGC Web Map Service (WMS) Implementation Specification.

4 How to use OGC standards?

If you want to integrate spatial data using OGC standards, you must first identify the sources, formats, and standards of the data and services you want to integrate. Then, choose the appropriate OGC standards that match your integration needs and objectives, such as the data model, schema, interface, protocol, or service standard. After that, you need to implement or adopt the OGC standards in your spatial data and services using compliant software tools, libraries, or frameworks. Additionally, it's important to test and validate the compliance and interoperability of your spatial data and services with the OGC standards. Finally, you can publish or consume your spatial data and services using the OGC standards by registering them in a catalog service or accessing them through a web service.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?