1.2.2. Products

Products

As you could read in the chapters above, the most important activity of OGC is the development of specifications. These specifications can be divided into two groups:

• Abstract Specifications: They provide the conceptual foundation for most OGC specification development activities. Open interfaces and protocols are built and referenced against the Abstract Specification, thus enabling interoperability between different brands and different kinds of spatial processing systems. The Abstract Specification provides a reference model for the development of OpenGIS Implementation Specifications (OGC). E.g. the Abstract Specification Features defines what features are and Relationship Between Features defines the relationship between those features. If you are interested in the available Abstract Specifications, have a look at the following link: OGC Abstract Specifications.

• Implementation Specifications: They are written for a more technical audience and detail the interface structure between software components. An interface specification is considered to be at the implementation level of detail if, when implemented by two different software engineers in ignorance of each other, the resulting components plug and play with each other at that interface (OGC). A few Implementation Specifications will be introduces later in this lesson.