Jun 12, 2014 -- The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC™) membership seeks public comment on the candidate OGC Web Map Tile Service Simple Profile of the OGC Web Map Tile Service (WMTS) Interface Standard.

Current OGC WMTS Interface Standard implementations return small, pre-generated map images (e.g., PNG or JPEG) or reuse cached map requests that follow a discrete set of tile matrices. The standard defines rules for multiple request/response patterns, including KVP, REST and SOAP.

The candidate OGC WMTS Simple Profile aligns the currently implemented and more comprehensive OGC WMTS Interface Standard to other popular tile initiatives that are less flexible but widely adopted. Server implementations of this profile should share two common sets of tile matrices and have a mandatory RESTful interface, though other interfaces are allowed.  The WMTS Simple Profile is designed to allow developers to more quickly implement the WMTS standard.

The 30 day public comment period for the OGC WMTS Simple Profile ends 2014-07-12. After the OGC’s WMS Standards Working Group has addressed comments received in response to the WMTS RFC the draft documents will be submitted to the OGC Technical Committee and Planning Committee for their review and possible approval as an adopted OGC Standard.

The WMTS Simple Profile RFC can be downloaded from http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/122.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 475 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. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/.