The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international voluntary consensus standards organization that develops and maintains international standards for geospatial content and location-based services, sensor web, Internet of Things, GIS data processing and data sharing.

Currently, commercial, government, nonprofit, universities, and research organizations participate in a consensus process encouraging development, maintenance, and implementation of open standards.

[3] Most of the OGC Standards depend on a generalized architecture captured in a set of documents collectively called the Abstract Specification.

Shortly after, a series of standards based on the HTTP web services paradigm for message-based interactions in web-based systems were developed and approved.

The Compliance Program provides an online free testing facility,[14] a process[15] for certification and branding of compliant products, and community coordination.