Overview of OGC and ISO TC211 support

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Technical Committee 211 (TC211) are the two leading geospatial standards organizations. Esri and other companies in the GIS community participate within these organizations to continually develop and improve these standards.

As OGC and ISO standards evolve, ArcGIS is updated to support them through new releases and service packs. Information on OGC compliance testing for ArcGIS can be found at http://www.opengeospatial.org/resources/?page=products.

Many ArcGIS client applications have built-in support for working with OGC services. The table below summarizes the OGC services that are supported in each application.

	KML	WCS	WFS	WMS	WMTS	WPS
ArcGIS for Desktop	X	X	X	X	X
ArcGIS.com map viewer	X			X
ArcGIS Viewer for Flex	X			X
ArcGIS Viewer for Silverlight	X			X
ArcGIS API for JavaScript	X			X	X
ArcGIS API for Flex	X			X	X
ArcGIS API for Silverlight	X			X	X
ArcGIS Explorer Online	X			X

To learn more about how ArcGIS implements and supports OGC and ISO TC211 standards, you can reference the following topics:

Web Services

Specification	Links
WCS—Web Coverage Service	Serving raster data as WCS.) Adding a WCS service layer to ArcMap
WFS—Web Feature Service	Working with WFS services
WMS—Web Mapping Service and SLD—Styled Layer Descriptor	Adding a WMS layer to ArcMap Publishing a WMS services Using a Styled Layer descriptor (SLD) with ArcGIS for Server
WMTS—Web Map Tile Service	Working with WMTS services
WPS—Web Processing Service	Working with WPS services

OGC and ISO support links

The above topics explain the types of OGC-compliant services you can publish with ArcGIS for Server and their uses. The ArcGIS for Server help books contain many topics about publishing these service types. Start with OGC support in ArcGIS Server.

GIS Data Formats

Specification	Links
KML—(formerly Keyhole Markup Language)	What is KML? A quick tour of KML in ArcGIS
GML—Geography Markup Language	Working with GML
OGC and ISO Simple Features (See notes below.)	How geodatabases are stored A quick tour of using SQL with enterprise geodatabases

OGC and ISO support for data

Note:

Geodatabases in IBM DB2, Informix, Oracle, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL implement the OGC and ISO SQL data type for Spatial. This data type provides full geodatabase support as well as SQL access to feature class geometry.

• The OGC reference is OpenGIS Implementation Specification for Geographic information - Simple feature access - Part 2: SQL option.
• The ISO reference is ISO/IEC 13249-3 SQL multimedia and application packages - Part 3: Spatial.

Metadata specifications

Specification	Links
Content standards for geospatial metadata	Metadata standards and styles
Metadata management in ArcGIS	Metadata workflows
Publishing and searching metadata on the web	Publishing metadata using the GIS Portal Toolkit
CSW—OGC Catalog services for the web	Working with a CSW metadata service using the GIS Portal Toolkit (See the PDF guide Using the GIS Portal Toolkit.)
Z39.50—Library catalog services from the U.S. Library of Congress and ISO (Standard 23950)	Registering and using a Z39.50 metadata service using the GIS Portal Toolkit (See the PDF guide Using the GIS Portal Toolkit.)

Metadata support in ArcGIS