OGC Naming Authority

The OGC Naming Authority (OGC-NA) ensures an orderly process for assigning URIs for OGC resources, such as OGC documents, standards, XML namespaces, ontologies so they can provide clear and well-defined names and definitions for the geospatial community and beyond.

A URN namespace for the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)

Abstract

This document describes a URN (Uniform Resource Name) namespace that is engineered by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) for naming persistent resources published by the OGC. The formal Namespace identifier (NID) is “ogc”.

1. Introduction

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) produces many kinds of technical documents, including: specifications, working drafts, technical reports, discussion papers, and XML schemas. The OGC wishes to provide persistent, location-independent identifiers for these resources.

The core mission of the OGC is to develop spatial interface specifications that are openly available and royalty free. Products and services that conform to OGC interface specifications enable users to freely exchange and process spatial information across networks, computing platforms, and products. Interoperability in such an environment is facilitated by the use of a system of persistent identifiers that are global in scope.

Motivated by these concerns, the OGC would like to assign formal URNs to published resources in order to provide persistent, location-independent identifiers for them. The process for registering a namespace identifier is documented in RFC 3406 [2]. The official IANA registry of URN namespaces is available online:

http://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-namespaces.


2. URN Specification for “ogc” NID

Namespace ID:

The NID “ogc” is requested.

Registration Information:

Registration Version Number: 1
Registration Date: 2006-11-20

Declared registrant of the namespace:

Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (Headquarters)
35 Main Street, Suite 5
Wayland, MA 01778-5037, USA
c/o Carl Reed (creed@opengeospatial.org)

Declaration of syntactic structure:

The Namespace Specific String (NSS) of all URNs that use the “ogc”

NID will have the following structure:

urn:ogc:{OGCresource}:{ResourceSpecificString}

where the “OGCresource” is a US-ASCII string that conforms to the URN syntax requirements [RFC2141] and defines a specific class of resource type. Each resource type has a specific labeling scheme that is covered by “ResourceSpecificString”, which also conforms to the naming requirements of [RFC2141].

The OGC maintains a naming authority, the OGC Naming Authority (OGCNA), that will manage the assignment of “OGCresources” and the specific registration values assigned for each resource class.

Relevant ancillary documentation:

The OGC Naming Authority (OGCNA) provides information on the registered resources and the registrations for each. More information about OGCNA and the registration activities and procedures to be followed are available at:

http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogcna

Identifier uniqueness considerations:

The OGCNA will manage resources using the “ogc” NID and will be the authority for managing the resources and subsequent strings associated. In the associated procedures, OGCNA will ensure the uniqueness of the strings themselves or shall permit secondary responsibility for management of well-defined sub-trees.

OGC may permit use of experimental type values that will not be registered. As a consequence, multiple users may end up using the same value for separate uses. As experimental usage is only intended for testing purposes, this should not be a real issue.


Identifier persistence considerations:

OGCNA will provide clear documentation of the registered uses of the “ogc” NID. This will be structured such that each OGCresource will have a separate description and registration table.

The registration tables and information will be published and maintained by OGCNA on the OGC web site.

Process of identifier assignment:

OGCNA will use the approved OGC standards policies and procedures for discussion, approval and registration of each type of resource that it maintains (https://portal.ogc.org/files/?artifact_id=12586). Each such resource may have three types of registration activities:

1) Registered values associated with OGC specs or services
2) Registration of values or sub-trees to other entities
3) Name models for use in experimental purposes

Process for identifier resolution:

The namespace is not listed with an RDS; this is not relevant.

Rules for Lexical Equivalence:

No special considerations; the rules for lexical equivalence of [RFC2141] apply.

Conformance with URN Syntax:

No special considerations.

Validation mechanism:

None specified. URN assignment will be handled by procedures implemented in support of OGCNA activities.

Scope:

Global

3. Examples

The following examples are representative urns that could be assigned by OGCNA. They may not be the actual strings that would be assigned.

urn:ogc:specification:gml:doc-is(02-023r4):3.00

Defines the urn to be used to identify a specific version of an OGC specification document for the Geography Markup Language in the OGC document archives.

urn:ogc:serviceType:CatalogueService:2.0:HTTP

Defines the urn to be used for an application to specify the specific service type for an OGC Catalogue service.

urn:ogc:def:crs:EPSG:6.3:26986

Is the URN defined to reference the definition of the Coordinate Reference System (CRS) with code 26986 that is specified in version 6.3 of the EPSG database.

4. Namespace Considerations:

There is currently no available namespace that will allow the OGC to uniquely specify and access resources, such as schemas and registries, that are required by organizations implementing OGC standards. There is also a need for other standards organizations, such as OASIS and the IETF to be able to access OGC specific resources.

5. Community Considerations

Many of the current OGC standards require access to resources, such as schemas, registries, catalogues, OGC documents, and OGC enabled services. In order for the larger IT community to be able to effectively implement applications that access OGC resources, a unique namespace is required. We desire these resources to be freely and openly available as a set of community resources.

6. Security Considerations

There are no additional security considerations other than those normally associated with the use and resolution of URNs in general.

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