The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc (OGC) is an international industry consortium of companies, government agencies and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface standards. OpenGIS Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. The standards empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful with all kinds of applications.

CSW: The Catalogue Service Interface Standard CSW supports the ability to publish and search collections of descriptive information (metadata) about geospatial data, services and related resources.
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WMS: The Web Map Service Interface Standard WMS provides a simple HTTP interface for requesting geo-registered map images from one or more distributed geospatial databases.
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WFS: The Web Feature Service (WFS) Implementation Specification defines an interface for specifying requests for retrieving geographic features (geographic vector data) across the Web using platform-independent calls.
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