+The need for geospatial data exchange between different systems began to be recognized in the 1970s and 1980s, but proprietary formats still dominated. Coordinated standardization efforts brought the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) establishment in the 1990s, a critical step towards open standards for geospatial data. The 1990s have also seen the development of key standards such as the Network Common Data Form (NetCDF) developed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and the Hierarchical Data Format (HDF), a set of file formats (HDF4, HDF5) that are widely used, particularly in climate research. The GeoTIFF format, which originated at NASA in the late 1990s, is extensively used to share image data. In the 1990s, open web mapping also began with MapServer (https://mapserver.org) and continued later with other projects such as OpenStreetMap (www.openstreetmap.org). The following two decades, the 2000s-2020s, brought an expansion of open standards and integration with web technologies developed by OGC, as well as other standards such as the Keyhole Markup Language (KML) for displaying geographic data in Earth browsers. Formats suitable for cloud computing also emerged, such as the Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG), followed by Zarr and Apache Parquet for array and tabular data, respectively. In 2006, the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo, https://www.osgeo.org) was established, demonstrating the community's commitment to the development of open-source geospatial technologies. While some standards have been developed in the industry (e.g., Keyhole Markup Language (KML) by Keyhole Inc., which Google later acquired), they later became international standards of the OGC, which now encompasses more than 450 commercial, governmental, nonprofit, and research organizations working together on the development and implementation of open standards (https://www.ogc.org).
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