The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) announced the completion and availability of Version 2.0 of the OGC Reference Model (ORM) at www.opengeospatial.org/standards/orm. The ORM provides a framework for the ongoing work of the OGC and a guide for those who seek to implement interoperable solutions and applications for geospatial services and data.
The ORM focuses on relationships between the documents in the OGC Standards Baseline (SB), which consists of
the approved OpenGIS Abstract and Implementation Standards (Interface, Encoding, Profile, Application Schema) and OGC Best Practice documents.
The ORM provides insight into the current state of the work of the OGC and thus serves as a useful resource for defining architectures for specific applications. It helps prospective members see how they might serve their stakeholders by making a contribution to the OGC process, and it provides overall guidance to developers who are implementing one or more of the OpenGIS Standards. The ORM contains numerous links to OGC resources that provide more detailed information.
It is the result of extensive development by hundreds of OGC Member Organizations and tens of thousands of individuals who have contributed to the development of OGC standards since 1994. The OGC is an international consortium of more than 365 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OpenGIS Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled.
