Publishing Geological Subsurface Models via OGC API

The open geospatial consortium (OGC) provides standards to store and transport geospatial data. A new family of standards around the OGC API seeks to replace the well established standard WFS (Web feature service), WMS (Web map service) or WCS (Web coverage service) for transporting geospatial data. The old standards were designed nearly 20 years ago. They are based on XML and define a now outdated interface to interact with geospatial data.

At the same time new kinds of geospatial data evolved. The new OGC API standard defines a shared, extensible REST interface based on JSON endpoints for managing geospatial data. The OGC API unifies the various W*S and extends them with support for new kinds of geospatial data. The standard consists of various parts and pieces that can be combined as required by specific usecases.

As part of this talk I want to demonstrate how to use various parts of the OGC API to share geological subsurface models to different shareholders for visualisation and modelling purposes. Finally I want to outline various limitations of the current set of OGC API standards for describing and transporting geological subsurface models.