The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has announced that its members have approved OGC API – Maps – Part 1: Core as an official OGC Standard for defining a web interface for portraying geographic information.
According to the OGC, one of the Core Standard’s main benefits is the ability to generate maps by combining data from one or more servers into a single view, ensuring fast and efficient cartographic portrayal.
Additional features include:
- Options for retrieving data layers within specific areas of interest (AOIs).
- Specifying transparency, styles, scales, and device display settings.
- The ability to specify map orientation.
- Support for multiple coordinate reference systems.
The OGC says the new Core Standard is “designed as a modern, API-based alternative to the Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Map Tile Service (WMTS) Standards” that can be “integrated with the OGC API – Tiles – Part 1: Core Standard to support more advanced capabilities”.
Example API definitions and schemas have been published on the OGC API – Maps webpage in order to help developers quickly implement products that support this standard. Those resources conform to OpenAPI Specification v3.0.
