Using Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) web services, you can make your maps and data available in an open, internationally recognized format over the web. OGC defines specifications for making maps and data available on the web to anyone with a supported client application, whether it be web-based (such as in the ArcGIS Enterprise portal's Map Viewer) or rich desktop clients such as ArcGIS Pro.
OGC publishing capabilities in ArcGIS Server
OGC defines several types of services for serving different kinds of data and maps. ArcGIS Enterprise supports the following OGC service types:
- Web Map Service (WMS) for serving collections of layers as map images
- Web Map Tile Service (WMTS) for serving map layers as cached map tiles
- Web Feature Service (WFS) for serving data as vector features
- Web Coverage Service (WCS) for serving data as raster coverages
- Web Processing Service (WPS) for serving geospatial processing
You publish these services by enabling capabilities on certain types of ArcGIS Server services. When you create the service, you must explicitly enable the OGC capabilities; they are not enabled by default.
The following table shows which service types can expose OGC capabilities:
| Service type | WCS | WFS | WMS | WMTS | WPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Map services |  | | | | |
Geodata services | | | |||
Image services | | | | ||
Geoprocessing services | |
Consuming OGC services
You can consume OGC services, whether they're hosted inside or outside your organization, using Esri software:
- ArcGIS Enterprise
- ArcGIS Online
- ArcGIS Pro
- ArcGIS Desktop
- ArcGIS API for JavaScript
- ArcGIS Runtime
Securing OGC services
OGC services are secured by managing the security of their parent services. For example, when you deny a certain role access to a map service, a user in that role will not be able to access the map service through SOAP, Representational State Transfer (REST), or any OGC interfaces (WMS, WMTS, WFS, WCS, or WPS).
ArcGIS Server supports a variety of authentication schemes. Services that are expected to be accessed via OGC interfaces should be secured using HTTP Basic or HTTP Digest. Most OGC clients (both non-Esri as well as Esri clients) will understand and work with these widespread standard authentication schemes.
Further reading
The links below contain more information about publishing OGC services to ArcGIS Server sites:
You can learn more about OGC services at the Open Geospatial Consortium website.