The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) is a non-profit, international, voluntary consensus standards organization that is leading the development of standards for geospatial and location based services. Through our member-driven consensus programs, OGC works with government, private industry, and academia to create open and extensible software application programming interfaces for geographic information systems (GIS) and other mainstream technologies. Adopted specifications are available for the public's use at no cost.

ISO is a network of the national standards institutes of 148 countries, on the basis of one member per country, with a Central Secretariat in Geneva, Switzerland, that coordinates the system. ISO is a non-governmental organization: its members are not, as is the case in the United Nations system, delegations of national governments. Nevertheless, ISO occupies a special position between the public and private sectors. This is because, on the one hand, many of its member institutes are part of the governmental structure of their countries, or are mandated by their government. On the other hand, other members have their roots uniquely in the private sector, having been set up by national partnerships of industry associations. Therefore, ISO is able to act as a bridging organization in which a consensus can be reached on solutions that meet both the requirements of business and the broader needs of society, such as the needs of stakeholder groups like consumers and users.

The inspirenconcpet: INSPIRE is ambitious. The initiative intends to trigger the creation of a European spatial information infrastructure that delivers to the users integrated spatial information services. These services should allow the users to identify and access spatial or geographical information from a wide range of sources, from the local level to the global level, in an inter-operable way for a variety of uses. The target users of INSPIRE include policy-makers, planners and managers at European, national and local level and the citizens and their organisations. Possible services are the visualisation of information layers, overlay of information from different sources, spatial and temporal analysis, etc.

GISIG was constituted in 1992 and is a sectoral non-profit making Association on Geographical Information Systems (GIS) grouping about 100 Organisations from more than 20 European countries. They are organisations working on territorial subjects and research institutions which guarantee interdisciplinary experiences, both on GIS as technological tools and on their sectoral applications (urban and territorial planning, agriculture, transports, environment, etc.). GISIG aims at realising the co-operation among GIS operators through the promotion and development of joint European projects (in the field of education and training, research and development, as well as regional development policies). Such projects are mainly devoted to the technology transfer towards SMEs and Local Public Authorities, and to the exchange of experiences at European level, also promoting the international cooperation with particular emphasis towards the Central and Eastern European Countries

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