The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is excited to announce that the OGC Membership has approved Version 1.0 of the OGC API - Common - Part 1: Core specification for adoption as an official OGC Standard.
In recent years, OGC has extended its suite of Standards to include Resource Oriented Architectures and Web APIs. In the course of developing these Standards, some practices proved to be common across multiple OGC Web API Standards. These common practices are documented in the multi-part OGC API - Common Standard for use as foundational building blocks in the construction of other OGC Standards that relate to Web APIs.
The Standard seeks to establish a solid foundation that can be extended by other resource-specific Web API Standards. This consistent foundation for Standards development will result in a modular suite of coherent API standards that can be adapted by a system designer for the unique requirements of their system.
The OGC API - Common – Part 1: Core Standard provides the fundamental rules for implementing a Web API that conforms to OGC design parameters. First, this OGC Standard establishes rules for the use of HTTP protocols and Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), regardless of the resources being accessed. It then enables discovery operations directed against a Web API implementation, such as identifying the hosted resources, defining conformance classes, and providing both human and machine-readable documentation of the API design.
The requirements specified in the Standard are envisaged to be applicable to any Web API implementation. Indeed, at the time of publication of OGC API - Common - Part 1: Core, the standard has already been validated by several other OGC API Standards, including OGC API – Environmental Data Retrieval and OGC API – Tiles. This ‘validate-first’ approach has ensured that OGC API - Common - Part 1: Core presents a harmonized view of the building blocks that are common to all OGC API Standards.
The OGC API – Common – Part 1: Core Standard document is specified as a series of building blocks advertised through a building blocks register. Future parts of the Standard will provide further building blocks that extend the functionality. For example, future parts will document how to organize and describe collections of resources, or how to define operations for the discovery and selection of individual collections.
To enable software developers to rapidly implement products that support OGC API – Common, example API definition files and associated schemas are available on the OGC API – Common website. The API definition files conform to Version 3.0 of the OpenAPI Specification, and thus can be easily integrated into many of the Web APIs that are described using the OpenAPI Specification.
Anyone interested in following the future development of OGC API – Common is welcomed to engage with the OGC API – Common GitHub Repository. OGC Members interested in staying up to date on the progress of this standard, or contributing to its development, are encouraged to join the OGC API – Common SWG SWG via the OGC Portal.
As with any OGC Standard, Version 1.0 of the OGC API – Common – Part 1: Core Standard is free to download and implement.