25 February 2013 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has adopted "Semantic annotations in OGC standards" as an OGC Best Practice.

OGC standards provide standard ways of locating and transporting network-resident geospatial data and ways of locating and invoking geospatial services. Without proper descriptions of these resources, however, use of the resources is limited to small user groups. To make a geospatial resource more widely discoverable, assessable and useful, resource providers must annotate the resource with descriptive metadata that can be read and understood by a broad audience. Without such metadata, people will neither be able to find the resource using search engines nor will they be able to evaluate if the discovered resource satisfies their current information need.

This OGC Best Practice explains preferred methods of providing semantic annotation in OGC Web Service environments. It explains how to use the OGC Capabilities-Document and descriptions of feature types, coverages and processes to publish, discover, access, invoke, and finally visualize spatial data. It extends existing OGC standards and applies standards from other organizations such as the W3C to OGC Standards.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 480 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.