Seven heuristics for standards development drawn from personal experience with the Open Geospatial Consortium — with history as a guide for future standards work.
Introduction
Innovation, Maturation, and Adaptation are essential for standards development. This article describes seven heuristics for standards development based on personal experience with the Open Geospatial Consortium. With history as a guide, these heuristics can be valuable for future standards developments.
OGC Standards provide operational access to 2 million geospatial datasets. OGC brings together leading technologists to envision and enable geospatial information innovations. These seven heuristics capture a perspective on how this has come about — and what principles underlie the longevity and widespread adoption of open geospatial standards.
A theme running through all seven heuristics has much in common with the lessons of The Innovators: "most successful innovators of the digital age have had one thing in common: they were product people. They cared about, and deeply understood, the engineering and design."
OGC at a Glance
Origin
Heuristics drawn from decades of personal experience leading OGC's technical strategy, interoperability program, and standards development as CTO and Chief Engineer.
Application
Offered for use in future standards development — including emerging areas such as AI standards, Spatial Web governance, and the IEEE 2874-2025 ecosystem.
Perspective
Standards are not static artifacts — they are stable intermediate forms that enable innovation and evolution in a complex adaptive technology ecosystem.
The Seven Heuristics
Each heuristic captures a lesson learned from OGC's decades of open standards work — from the first testbed in 1999 to the current generation of AI and Spatial Web standards.
Have a broad vision of the goal; begin with focused activities that build toward the vision. Development toward the vision is achieved in a thousand small steps. Experience based on implementations evolves the vision over time.
OGC Example
The OpenGIS Guide written in 1996 provided the initial OGC vision of "Geodata interoperability." In 2013, the Ideas4OGC activity refined that vision. Each focused initiative moved the needle — without ever losing sight of the larger goal.Standards work best when they are open — developed in an open community process and published freely for use with minimal restrictions. By recognizing externally developed standards as Community Standards, OGC builds on an open community. The OGC approach to open consensus standards reaches beyond individual standards, participating as a leading member of the evolving geo tech ecosystem.
OGC Example
OGC actively coordinates with other organizations relevant to the mission of open geospatial standards — including ISO, IEEE, W3C, and the Metaverse Standards Forum — building a broader interoperability fabric rather than a closed proprietary stack.Standards based on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math are more resilient and long lasting. Basing standards on STEM helps establish consensus and provides a principled basis for adaptation as technology evolves. The OGC Abstract Specification continues the process of capturing general STEM principles that are refined by implementation using current software development.
OGC Example
In 1997, OGC and NCGIA co-hosted a conference that began the habit of OGC using STEM in standards development — grounding geospatial standards in rigorous mathematical and scientific foundations rather than purely in market or vendor preferences.The first OGC testbed in 1999 adopted the IETF mantra of "running code wins." A key consideration for the OGC Community Standard process is very strong evidence of implementation. Implementation in small steps, iteratively refined using STEM, provides evidence for building consensus and demonstrates the value of the standards.
OGC Example
OGC API development sprints place highest priority on implementation. The Community Standard process requires concrete, working implementations — not just theoretical specifications — before a standard can achieve recognition.Technology advances based on past achievements. Novel combination of related technologies — typically developed in small groups over multiple iterations — is the source of innovation. Early identification of emergent innovations by tracking research and industry developments became systematized in OGC Tech Forecasting.
OGC Example
OGC Simple Features was a synthesis of many inputs that remain key to its longevity and widespread implementation. Ideas4OGC brought attention to the Innovator's Dilemma of adopting technology innovations before the customer is asking for change — building in structural awareness of disruption risk.Increasing the technology readiness level through testing, refinement of the standard, and widespread community use is essential to operational use of standards and a robust standards baseline. The more prototypes and prototyping cycles per unit of time, the more technically polished the final product.
OGC Example
The OGC Interoperability Program drives maturity of potential solutions and increases technology adoption in the marketplace — progressing through testbeds (TRL 4), pilots (TRL 7), and operational deployment. Each cycle increases the readiness level and builds community confidence.Standards evolve in a complex adaptive ecosystem of technology development and operational systems. Changes to the OGC Standards Baseline based on experience from various applications and communities result in emergent adaptation. Standards are stable intermediate forms necessary for innovation and evolution in a technology ecosystem. Complex adaptive system models provide a framework for technology evolution and their disruptive effects.
OGC Example
Future application of complex adaptive system models will benefit standards development — treating the standards baseline not as a fixed canon but as an evolving system that responds to environmental pressures from new technologies, communities, and use cases."Most successful innovators of the digital age had one thing in common: they were product people. They cared about, and deeply understood, the engineering and design."
— The Innovators, Walter Isaacson · Referenced by George Percivall
These seven heuristics are not abstract principles — they are lessons extracted from decades of work building the open geospatial standards infrastructure that underpins operational access to millions of datasets worldwide. They reflect the lived experience of navigating the tension between visionary ambition and pragmatic implementation, between scientific rigor and community consensus, between stability and adaptation.
They are offered for use in future standards development — including the rapidly evolving domains of AI standards, Spatial Web governance, and the broader ecosystem of socio-technical systems engineering that GeoRoundtable addresses today.
The underlying conviction is that standards are not bureaucratic artifacts but living systems: stable intermediate forms that make innovation possible by providing a shared foundation from which new ideas can safely depart.
Related Work
Interested in applying these heuristics to your standards work, AI governance, or open ecosystem strategy? Get in touch.
✉️ percivall@ieee.org