OGC Standards Officially Endorsed by US Federal Geographic Data Committee

In a press announcement today from the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) - The US Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) Steering Committee has officially endorsed a group of OGC standards along with other standards developed externally to FGDC. These standards play an important role in enabling interoperability as part of the Geospatial Platform for GeoOneStop, place-based initiatives, and other potential future programs of the FGDC.

The Steering Committee endorsed standards from the OGC, ISO TC211 and ANSI (INCITS L1) standards development organizations - including Web Map Server (WMS), Web Feature Server (WFS), Web Map Tile Service (WMTS), Geography Markup Language (GML) and many others.

"OGC's interface and encoding standards are an essential part of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure. They play a key role in providing technical interoperability among geospatial systems used at all levels of government," said Ivan DeLoatch, Executive Director of the FGDC. "We encourage government agencies to include these standards, as well as FGDC's data standards, in the language of software and data procurement documents."

The FGDC Standards Working Group will revisit the list every year as part of its standards life-cycle management activities.

The Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) is an interagency committee that promotes the coordinated development, use, sharing, and dissemination of geospatial data on a national basis. This nationwide data publishing effort is known as the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI). The NSDI is a physical, organizational, and virtual network designed to enable the development and sharing of this nation's digital geographic information resources. FGDC activities are administered through the FGDC Secretariat, hosted by the U.S. Geological Survey.