Does OGC promote standard data models and standard metadata schemas?
OGC encourages these efforts, recognizes their value and their limitations, and provides a framework of software interface standards and data encoding standards that helps people make the best possible use of others’ data despite dissimilar data models and metadata schemas. A data model details how to take real world objects or phenomena and make them useful in computer applications. In the geospatial world the focus is on points, lines, polygons and attributes of geographic features. Metadata is “data about data,” important in finding data and evaluating its usefulness for a particular purpose. A metadata schema is a template or structure for metadata. Without coordination, different people and organizations working at different times on different kinds of projects produce data using different data models, and they describe their data using different metadata schemas. The differences have made it very hard to share and combine data. Coordination efforts are underway in many countries
