Identify and describe an OGC Application Programming Interface (API)
Geospatial Web Services make geospatial information available as part of the World Wide Web. Much of the geographic information on the Web are documents that require significant processing to be used as geospatial products like maps and features. Geospatial Web Services exposes services of a GIS platform to the Web. To achieve this the standards that underlie the WWW - http, html, etc. - were extended with geospatial technologies. The Web Map Service - standardized by the Open Geospatial Consortium in 1999 - marked a milestone in the development and deployment of geospatial web services. WMS along with additional standards now provide access to millions of geospatial data and services on the Web. As of 2024, over 3.5 million spatial datasets were available on the internet served by over 400,000 operational services using OGC standards.