Our History

Celebrating 30 years of service

OGC unites organizations that might not typically work together to solve some of society’s biggest challenges using geography, geospatial technology and data. From the very start, we have promoted open standards to ensure interoperability among diverse geospatial systems. 

We had 8 charter members when we started in 1994. Today, our more than 450 members include influential GIS vendors, technology integrators, governments, non-profits and data providers. 

Since our founding OGC has continued to make progress on interoperability, from the Standards Program’s first approved implementation standard in 1997 to the first Interoperability Program testbed (Web Mapping Testbed) in 1999 to today’s broad array of standards and initiatives. 

More than 150 approved OGC standards are now freely available to address the challenges that were identified at OGC’s founding, and many others that have been identified since. 

The real measure of OGC’s success is that these standards have been implemented in hundreds of commercial and open-source geoprocessing products and are being implemented in communities and organizations around the world.

1994: OGC was founded on September 25th with 8 charter members 

1995: OGC reaches 20 members 

1997: OGC’s First Standard – Simple Features Approved 

1999: First annual Gardels award 

2000: First OGC Web Service Standard – Web Map Service, First OGC Encoding Standard – GML 

2002: First OGC data access service standard – Web Feature Service – WFS 

2004: Open GIS Consortium Becomes Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc

2005: Web Map Service (WMS) Approved as International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Standard 

2008: First OGC Standard for the Built Environment – CityGML. First commercial de-facto specification adopted as an OGC standard – KML 

2013: First standard for packaging diverse data types by means of web services – GeoPackage 

2014: OGC’s 20th Anniversary 

2017: GeoRSS becomes the first OGC Community Standard; Indexed 3D Scene Layers approved as first Community Standard from a commercial entity (Esri) 

2018: First OGC code sprint: WFS3 (to become OGC API – Features) 

2019: 3D Tiles becomes a Community Standard (Cesium); first OGC API Standard published OGC API – Features – Part 1: Core 

2024: OGC’s 30th anniversary and 20th Testbed