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A geospatial standards organization known as the Open Geospatial Consortium

The OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) is an international not for profit organization committed to making quality open standards for the global geospatial community. These standards are made through a consensus process and are freely available for anyone to use to improve sharing of the world's geospatial data.

See: http://www.opengeospatial.org/

The standards that OGC define include many of the common interface standards used in web mapping such as:

  • Web Map Services (WMS)
  • Web Feature Service (WFS)
  • Web Coverage Service (WCS)
  • Sensor Observation Services (SOS)
  • Web Map Tiling Service (WMTS)
  • Web Processing Service (WPS)
  • Catalogue Service (CSW)

OGC also defines various Markup Languages such as:

  • Keyhole Markup Language (KML)
  • Geography Markup Language (GML)

And encoding standards such as:

  • Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD)
  • Filter Encoding (FE)