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4. OPEN GIS CONSORTIUM 
The Open GISConsortium (OGC) is the most important 
international industry consortium for geographic information. 
It was founded in 1994 and evolved from the GRASS user 
groups. GRASS used to be the geographic information 
system developed by the U.S. military. Today the OGC has 
more than 250 members categorized into strategic, principle, 
technical, and associate members. The nine strategic 
members are large U.S. companies and institutions such as 
Northrop Grummen, Intergraph, NASA, and NGA (National 
Geostatial intelligence Agency). They raise about 60% of the 
overall budget of the OGC. 
In 1999 the. ISO/TC 211 and. the OGC. started a. close 
cooperation in which the OGC plays the role of providing the 
implementation level standards that fit into the abstract frame 
set by the ISO. The activities of the OGC are split into the 
Adopted Document Baseline and the initiatives of the 
Interoperability Program. The Adopted Document Baseline 
covers all OGC standards. The abstract standards have lost 
their original relevance as many of their concepts have been 
integrated into the ISO 19100 standards. Today the strong 
foundation of the OGC standards are the implementation 
specifications. The Web Map Server Interface Specification 
and the Web Feature known. The 
Service are well 
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specifications for the Coverage and for the Geography 
Markup Language are forwarded as ISO 19100 standards 
(ISO 19123 and ISO 19136). 
Before an OGC specification is approved the documents are 
called discussion papers, requests for proposal, or requests 
for information. The discussion paper on SensorML has been 
mentioned. 
With the initiatives of the interoperability program the OGC 
provides guidance during the development of large GIS 
projects, often as an international cooperation. The North 
Rhine Westfalia Pilot Project (Germany) is an example of 
one of the recent successful projects. 
5. WORLD WIDE WEB CONSORTIUM (W3C) 
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was also founded 
in 1994. It has about 450 members. They are companies of 
the computer business that commonly forward the Internet 
technology and its related standards. The following W3C 
standards are the most relevant for geographic information: 
XML (Extensible Markup Language): As documents in XML 
can be interpreted by the present version of all common 
browsers this language has become the most popular way of 
transferring information via the Internet. XML provides the 
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