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Overview of OGC and ISO support
Release 9.3 Last modified October 13, 2010

A number of organizations help to develop and contribute to interoperability standards and specifications for the geospatial (GIS) community. ESRI remains committed to interoperability and is active in supporting and enhancing support for various standards developed through these organizations. This help section provides a guide to support capabilities in ArcGIS.

There are two primary (and often collaborative) standards efforts led by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the International Standards Organization (ISO). ESRI, along with other participants within the GIS community, participates in the development of numerous specifications within these organizations. For example, ESRI led the effort on authoring the OGC and ISO simple features specification and was the U.S. representative for the ISO 19139 technical committee metadata standards efforts.

ESRI actively pursues adding standards support in ArcGIS and its related products.

Standards are ongoing and evolve over time. ESRI builds support for key standards and maintains its support as the standards evolve. We update our support for OGC and ISO specifications with each software release and often we provide other mechanisms to deliver support through special add-on solutions between software releases.

Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Services

Specification	Links to more information
WMS - Web Mapping Service and SLD - Styled Layer Descriptor	Adding a WMS layer to ArcMap Publishing a WMS service using ArcGIS Server Using a Styled Layer descriptor (SLD) with ArcGIS Server Working with a WMS service in ArcIMS using the ArcIMS WMS Connector
WFS - Web Feature Service	Working with WFS in ArcGIS. See an Overview of working with WFS in ArcGIS Working with WFS in ArcIMS using the ArcIMS WFS Connector
WCS - Web coverage service	To understand more about serving WCS using ArcGIS Server, see Serving raster data as WCS. Consuming a WCS service within ArcGIS. see Adding a WCS service layer to ArcMap
CSW - Catalog services - Web	Refer to the CSW links in the metadata table below.

GIS Data Formats

Specification	Common tasks
GML - Geography Markup Language	Working with GML formats in ArcGIS
OGC and ISO Simple Features (See notes below)	Using OGC and ISO simple features in geodatabases Using SQL to access and work with simple features in a geodatabase

NOTE: Geodatabases in IBM DB2, Informix, Oracle, 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.

NOTE: The OGC reference is OpenGIS® Implementation Specification for Geographic information - Simple feature access - Part 2: SQL option.

NOTE: The ISO reference is ISO/IEC 13249-3 SQL multimedia and application packages - Part 3: Spatial.

Metadata Specifications

Specification	Common tasks
FGDC - U.S. Federal Geographic Data Committee	Using the FGDC metadata editor in ArcCatalog
ISO 19115/19139 Geographic Information Metadata	Provide support for the ISO 19139 metadata standard in ArcGIS Using the ISO metadata editor in ArcCatalog
Metadata conversion between profiles	Converting metadata in ArcGIS
Publishing metadata as a web service	Publishing a metadata catalog using ArcIMS Publishing metadata using the GIS Portal Toolkit. See the PDF guide named Using the GIS Portal Toolkit.
OAI-PMH - The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting	See the topic "Collecting metadata to create a community GIS portal" in the ArcIMS Online Help.
CSW - OGC Catalog services for the web	Working with a CSW metadata service using ArcIMS. See the ArcIMS help topic named "An overview of the CSW Connector" in the ArcIMS Online Help. Working with a CSW metadata service using the GIS Portal Toolkit. See the PDF guide named Using the GIS Portal Toolkit.
Z39.50 - Library catalog services from the U.S. Library of Congress and ISO (Standard 23950)	Publishing and searching a Z39.50 metadata service using the ArcIMS Metadata Service. See the ArcIMS Help topic named "Adding Z39.50 support to your Metadata Service" in the ArcIMS Online Help. Registering and using a Z39.50 metadata service using the GIS Portal Toolkit. See the PDF guide named Using the GIS Portal Toolkit.

If you cannot find support information about a particular standard that you are interested in, please contact us at http://support.esri.com/feedback to see if we can help support you. In addition, we would like to hear feedback on new or evolving standards you would like for ESRI to support.

Information on OGC compliance testing can be found at:
http://www.opengeospatial.org/resources/?page=products

Overview of OGC and ISO support