FDBNS OGC 20-057 (V1.0):2022 OGC API – TILES – PART 1: CORE

The Bahamas Bureau of Standards and Quality (BBSQ) is in the enquiry phase of developing the following standards that have been prepared by the Technical Committee comprising of technical experts from a wide cross section of stakeholders. The standard being issued for public comment, in accordance with the provisions set out in the Standards Act, Chapter 338 (2006), and in keeping with the international best practices and standards development procedures. Please note that these standards should not be reprinted or used for any other purpose other than review and public comments. This is due to the documents being copyrighted by ISO and being the sole property of the Bahamas Government.

The OGC API — Tiles Standard defines building blocks for implementing Web APIs that support the retrieval of tiled geospatial information. A Web API is an application programming interface for either a web server or a web browser [Wikipedia, 2022].

The OGC suite of Web API standards is an extensible framework for building HTTP based services that can be accessed in different applications on different platforms such as the Web, desktop, mobile, etc. The OGC API — Tiles Standard specifies how different forms/types of geospatial resources are supported, such as tiles of vector features (“vector tiles”), coverages, and maps (or imagery). Although OGC API — Tiles can be used independently, the building blocks can be combined with other OGC API Standards for additional capabilities or increased interoperability for specific types of data. The OGC API — Tiles Standard references the OGC Two-Dimensional Tile Matrix Set (TMS) and Tile Set Metadata Standard [OGC 17-083r4]. That Standard defines logical models and encodings for specifying tile matrix sets and describing tile sets. A tile matrix set is a tiling scheme that enables an application to partition and index space based on a set of regular grids defined for multiple scales in a Coordinate Reference System (CRS).

The OGC API — Tiles Standard is an alternative to the OGC’s Web Map Tile Service (WMTS) Standard. Instead of a fixed Web interface, OGC API — Tiles focuses on simple reusable REST API building blocks which can be described using the OpenAPI specification. Whereas WMTS focused on map tiles, the OGC API — Tiles Standard is designed to support any form of tiled data.