US: The members of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) have approved OpenSearch Geo and Time Extensions as an OGC standard. OpenSearch provides a standard way of describing search engine capabilities so that they can be leveraged by search client applications such as modern Web browsers.
The OGC OpenSearch Geo and Time Extensions standard specifies how to enhance search engines and configure them to access spatial data servers. Such enhancement enables users of similarly enhanced web browsers and other web applications to query resource URLs through search combinations of time extents, geographic areas or location names, and likely keywords.
Source: OGC
