Making my GIS application OGC compliant

Question

We have a stack of open source software's which we use to build a GIS. We would like to align our application to OGC as much as possible. I visited the site and read about the standards.

Now my question is how to start with making the application OGC compliant. There are lot of documents which talk about standards but I couldn't find much on how to get started. Specifically given that am building on top of Open Source software's and Implementing is very subjective word.

Can you guide me to some resources which can get me started?

Ideally we would like address Web Mobile and Desktop, We have a existing solution for Desktop but are planning to go ahead with Web. We are aiming for a GIS product.

Here is the list of Open Source Products: GDAL/OGR, GeoServer, OpenLayers, Cesium

Answer 1

As you have found in your research there is no how-to manual for "OGC-compliance". OGC standards are continuously debated by the OGC, vendors, the open-source community, government, and other users and stakeholders. Most real work ends up being implemented using non-OGC open specifications like geojson and shapefiles.

The simplest way to get started would be to implement KML import and export in your application. Here are the reason why:

-KML is an OGC standard

-KML is relatively simple to implement

-KML is widely supported on nearly all desktop and mobile platforms (sometimes read-only) but Google is always creating new Earth clients on different platforms

-KML can represent both vector and raster formats

-KML's kmz is also easy to implement (just zip compression) to distribute a single file for an entire GIS

So if you just want to be OGC compliant for marketing purposes, KML is the shortest route. It also buys you a good bit of true interoperability.