Overview of OGC and ISO TC211 support

There are two primary (and often collaborative and coordinated) geospatial standards efforts led by

• The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC)
• The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Technical Committee 211 (TC211)

ESRI, along with other participants within the GIS community, participates in the development of numerous specifications within these organizations.

ESRI actively pursues adding standards support in ArcGIS and its related products.

Standards are ongoing and evolve over time. ESRI builds support for key standards and maintains its support as the standards evolve, updating its support for OGC and ISO specifications with each software release and often providing interim software updates and add-ins to add standards support between major releases.

Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. Web Services

Specification	Links to more information
WMS—Web Mapping Service, and SLD—Styled Layer Descriptor	Adding a WMS layer to ArcMap Publishing a WMS service using ArcGIS Server Using a Styled Layer descriptor (SLD) with ArcGIS Server
WFS—Web Feature Service	Working with WFS in ArcGIS (See an Overview of working with WFS in ArcGIS .)
WCS—Web coverage service	Serving WCS using ArcGIS Server (See Serving raster data as WCS.) Consuming a WCS service within ArcGIS (See Adding a WCS service layer to ArcMap .)
CSW—Catalog services for the Web

OGC and ISO support links

GIS Data Formats

Specification	Links
GML—Geography Markup Language	An overview of GML support
OGC and ISO Simple Features (See notes below.)	How geodatabases are stored Using SQL to access and work geodatabases

OGC and ISO support for data

Note:

Geodatabases in IBM DB2, Informix, Oracle, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL implement the OGC and ISO SQL data type for Spatial. This data type provides full geodatabase support as well as SQL access to feature class geometry.

Note:

The OGC reference is OpenGIS Implementation Specification for Geographic information - Simple feature access - Part 2: SQL option.

Note:

The ISO reference is ISO/IEC 13249-3 SQL multimedia and application packages - Part 3: Spatial.

Metadata Specifications

Specification	Common tasks
Content standards for geospatial metadata	Metadata standards and styles
Metadata management in ArcGIS	Metadata workflows
Publishing and searching metadata on the Web	Publishing metadata using the GIS Portal Toolkit
CSW—OGC Catalog services for the Web	Working with a CSW metadata service using the GIS Portal Toolkit (See the PDF guide named Using the GIS Portal Toolkit.)
Z39.50—Library catalog services from the U.S. Library of Congress and ISO (Standard 23950)	Registering and using a Z39.50 metadata service using the GIS Portal Toolkit (See the PDF guide Using the GIS Portal Toolkit.)

Metadata support in ArcGIS

Information on OGC compliance testing for ArcGIS can be found at

http://www.opengeospatial.org/resources/?page=products