GeoAPI interfaces are derived from the abstract model and concrete specifications published collaboratively by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in its 19100 series of documents and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) in its abstract and implementation specifications.
GeoAPI provides an interpretation and adaptation of these standards to match the constraints and usages of the target programming language.
The first public release of Java interfaces in org.opengis packages was in the OpenGIS Coordinate Transformation Service Implementation Specification standard, published on January 12, 2001.
[4][5] Developers of Open Source projects joined later, following a public email calling for the creation of a geospatial API in October 2002.
GeoTools created a fork of GeoAPI interfaces but kept the org.opengis namespace, which caused incompatibilities with OGC standard releases.