OGC Compatible Geographical Information Systems Web Services

Abstract

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) defines a number of standards, both for data models and for online services, that has been widely adopted in the Geographical Information System (GIS) community. This has lead to a number of software development efforts, online data archives, and application communities. We survey these in the first part of this report. We furthermore find that the OGC standards are very compatible with Web Services standards, although they are not technically implemented this way. We therefore, in the second part of this report, describe our group's efforts to reimplement OGC standard services as web services. We focus particularly on the Web Map Service.