The Benefits of Our Standards Program

Engage in our Standards program to help identify, develop and advance geospatial standards.

Identifying Standards 

Domain Working Groups (DWGs) identify future standard needs. They’re a great place to start formulating your ideas to promote standards. DWGs are open to non-OGC members. 

Adopting Standards 

OGC members convene Standards Working Groups (SWGs) to prepare candidate standards for approval as OGC Standards. SWGs also revise existing OGC Standards. To participate in a SWG you must be an OGC Voting Member or above.  

Community Standards can be submitted to the OGC for endorsement. They can be brought forward by any OGC Member. Community Standards serve two purposes: 1) to bring de facto standards from the larger geospatial community to be a stable reference point that can normatively referenced by governments and other organizations; and 2) to bring new, but implemented, standards to the OGC to form the basis for further refinement and development of interoperability between other OGC standards.  

Moving a Community Standard through the OGC process takes approximately 6–9 months compared to 18–24 months for a traditional OGC Standard. 

Revising Standards 

OGC Members can comment on and make suggestions to Standards whether they are in development or have already been adopted. As part of OGC’s consensus-based approach, standards are open for public comment. Comments are submitted to a dedicated email address up to the “close request date” listed on the announcement page. Comments are then consolidated and reviewed by OGC members. You can subscribe to a distribution list to receive comments as they are submitted. Subscribing to the list will also allow you to view comments already received. OGC maintains a list of the archived comments it has received. OGC Members can suggest revisions to existing standards using an OGC Change Request Proposal (CRP). These can include issues logged in the SWG’s collaboration environment (GitHub or GitLab) or via Change Requests logged in the OGC CIO Standards Tracker. 

Advancing Standards 

OGC runs community events that bring together developers and interested parties in a collaborative coding environment to advance the use of standards across the geospatial domain. These include: 

  • Code Sprints – The focus of these three-day events is on implementing and advancing a standard specification. For newcomers, they provide a way of getting familiar with the specification and attend mentor streams offering guided tutorials. Code sprints cover all OGC Standards.  
  • Developer Workshops – Developer Workshops are held at the same time as OGC member meetings. They focus on a few selected standards and provide an overview of the specification as well as practical demonstrations. 
  • Outreach Days – On the last Thursday of every month we hold an informal virtual meeting to hack, document and discuss. It’s a chance to connect with our awesome OGC community. The agenda is set by the community. For dates of upcoming events please visit here.