Members of the International Standards Organization (ISO) have approved an international standard developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) with input from the ISO technical committee responsible for the ISO geographic information: ISO/TC211 Geographic Information/Geomatics.
The OGC’s Web Map Service (WMS) Specification (now also ISO 19128) specifies protocols that provide uniform access by HTML clients to maps rendered by WMS enabled map servers on the Internet. Software complying with the specification enables automatic overlay, in ordinary Web browsers, of map images obtained from multiple map servers, regardless of map scale, projection, earth coordinate system, storage format, or vendor solution.
WMS is not the first standard to receive joint approval. ISO19125-1:2004 (Geographic information – Simple Feature Access – Part 1: Common Architecture) and ISO 19125-2:2004 (Geographic information – Simple feature access – Part 2: SQL Option) were published earlier this year. OGC’s Geography Markup Language (GML) is being processed as ISO 19136 and several other Implementation Specifications from OGC are being submitted for ISO work.
