It is the vision of OGC to achieve industry-wide consensus on the fundamental classes and interfaces upon which Geographic Information Systems are constructed. By carefully introducing families of these classes and interfaces in the proper order, the Consortium enable services, applications, and user environments to be implemented. The actual implementations, that is, the software that enables data and services to be invoked, and to behave in the way proscribed by the interfaces, is the duty of the industry building content and applications. The implementations distinguish themselves in the marketplace and, through the new and improved goods and services they supply, generate a larger geospatial economy for all of us to enjoy. The result will be tighter linkages for the family of information technology standards related to geography, mapping, land use, land ownership, surveying, and so on.
Interoperability never happens by accident.
It takes careful planning, a consensus process, and representation by all of the communities in which interoperability is desired. OGC provides exactly this mix of government, academic, industrial, and trade discipline representation. The Cooperative Agreement between OGC and ISO TC211 is based upon a Terms of Reference for the Coordination Group created by the Agreement. These terms call for a continuous analysis of the opportunities whereby ISO and OGC can cooperate, to call these to the attention of both bodies, and to ensure that proper experts of each body are engaged in the activities. A secondary goal of the Cooperative Agreement is the advancing of OGC Implementation Specifications toward International Standard Status.