OGC standards

A new standard being developed in the OGC has an important part in improving shared situational awareness. The candidate OGC Web Services (OWS) Context standard encodes the key elements of a common operating picture: the geographic area, an optional time range, and an ordered series of layers from different services or inline content. This allows a situational awareness view of one user to be passed to other users so that the same picture can be reconstructed. The context standard also allows catalogue queries and results from multiple catalogues, and web processing requests and results to be passed around easily.