An organization such as our consortium not only builds technology consensus and creates standardizing specifications, it stabilizes the view and positioning of a technology by developing a stable definition for it and setting the expectations of the community. In this regard, expectation is as important as specification. Expectation defines the common vision of the community and shapes the imagination of the market. OGC is not driven by a narrow commercial agenda and does not hold the Open GIS trademark for profit. All the principal industry competitors are joined in the effort to make it succeed, and users' interests are represented by the federal agencies, universities, and non-governmental organizations who are members.
Membership is open.
Organizations join so that they can help create the Open Geodata Interoperability Specification and so that they can gain the technical knowledge and contacts that will help them use the OGIS to achieve their goals. The OGC membership expects OGC's staff to show leadership in driving the overall program, including public relations and trademarks and copyrights as well as governance of the technical program. Without this rigor, Open GIS could devolve into the same chaos that characterizes open computing. Open GIS is in no way inconsistent with such standards as SDTS and the Metadata Standard, and in fact it can be quite useful in implementing the Clearinghouse concept. The work of the FGDC is clearly important in aligning the community to create a more coherent, and thus more valuable, spatial data infrastructure.