OGC API - Features - Part 1: Core

collection of data, published or curated by a single agent, and available for access or download in one or more formats [DCAT]

represents an accessible form of a dataset [DCAT]

EXAMPLE: a downloadable file, an RSS feed or an API.

abstraction of real world phenomena [ISO 19101-1:2014]

a set of features from a dataset

API using an architectural style that is founded on the technologies of the Web [DWBP]

The normative provisions in this standard are denoted by the URI http://www.opengis.net/spec/ogcapi-features-1/1.0.

All requirements and conformance tests that appear in this document are denoted by partial URIs which are relative to this base.

To express relationships between resources, RFC 8288 (Web Linking) is used.

The following registered link relation types are used in this document.

In addition the following link relation types are used for which no applicable registered link relation type could be identified.

Each resource representation includes an array of links. Implementations are free to add additional links for all resources provided by the API. For example, an enclosure link could reference a bulk download of a collection. Or a related link on a feature could reference a related feature.

For simplicity, this document in general only refers to the HTTP protocol. This is not meant to exclude the use of HTTPS and simply is a shorthand notation for "HTTP or HTTPS." In fact, most servers are expected to use HTTPS, not HTTP.

This document does not restrict the lexical space of URIs used in the API beyond the requirements of the HTTP and URI Syntax IETF RFCs. If URIs include reserved characters that are delimiters in the URI subcomponent, these have to be percent-encoded. See Clause 2 of RFC 3986 for details.

While this is the first version of the OGC API Features series, the fine-grained access to features over the Web has been supported by the OGC Web Feature Service (WFS) standard (in ISO: ISO 19142) and many implementations of that standard for many years. WFS uses a Remote-Procedure-Call-over-HTTP architectural style using XML for any payloads. When the WFS standard was originally designed in the late 1990s and early 2000s this was the state-of-the-art.

OGC API Features supports similar capabilities, but using a modernized approach that follows the current Web architecture and in particular the W3C/OGC best practices for sharing Spatial Data on the Web as well as the W3C best practices for sharing Data on the Web.

Beside the general alignment with the architecture of the Web (e.g., consistency with HTTP/HTTPS, hypermedia controls), another goal for OGC API Features is modularization. This goal has several facets, as described below.

Implementations of OGC API Features are intended to support two different approaches how clients can use the API.

In the first approach, clients are implemented with knowledge about this standard and its resource types. The clients navigate the resources based on this knowledge and based on the responses provided by the API. The API definition may be used to determine details, e.g., on filter parameters, but this may not be necessary depending on the needs of the client. These are clients that are in general able to use multiple APIs as long as they implement OGC API Features.

The other approach targets developers that are not familiar with the OGC API standards, but want to interact with spatial data provided by an API that happens to implement OGC API Features. In this case the developer will study and use the API definition - typically an OpenAPI document - to understand the API and implement the code to interact with the API. This assumes familiarity with the API definition language and the related tooling, but it should not be necessary to study the OGC API standards.

This standard does not mandate any encoding or format for representing features or feature collections. In addition to HTML as the standard encoding for Web content, rules for commonly used encodings for spatial data on the web are provided (GeoJSON, GML).

None of these encodings is mandatory and an implementation of the Core requirements class may implement none of them but implement another encoding instead.

Support for HTML is recommended as HTML is the core language of the World Wide Web. A server that supports HTML will support browsing the data with a web browser and will enable search engines to crawl and index the dataset.

GeoJSON is a commonly used format that is simple to understand and well supported by tools and software libraries. Since most Web developers are comfortable with using a JSON-based format, this version of OGC API Features recommends supporting GeoJSON for encoding feature data, if the feature data can be represented in GeoJSON for the intended use.

Some examples for cases that are out-of-scope of GeoJSON are:

In addition to HTML and GeoJSON, a significant volume of feature data is available in XML-based formats, notably GML. GML supports more complex requirements than GeoJSON and does not have any of the limitations mentioned in the above bullets, but as a result GML is more complex to handle for both servers and clients. Conformance classes for GML are, therefore, included in this standard. It is expected that these conformance classes will typically be supported by servers where users are known to expect feature data in XML/GML.

The recommendations for using HTML and GeoJSON reflect the importance of HTML and the current popularity of JSON-based data formats. As the practices in the Web community evolve, the recommendations will likely be updated in future versions of this standard to provide guidance on using other encodings.

This part of the OGC API Features standards does not provide any guidance on other encodings. The supported encodings, or more precisely the media types of the supported encodings, can be determined from the API definition. The desired encoding is selected using HTTP content negotiation.

For example, if the server supports GeoJSON Text Sequences, an encoding that is based on JSON text sequences and GeoJSON to support streaming by making the data incrementally parseable, the media type application/geo+json-seq would be used.

In addition, HTTP supports compression and therefore the standard HTTP mechanisms can be used to reduce the size of the messages between the server and the client.

This document uses a simple example throughout the document: The dataset contains buildings and the server provides access to them through a single feature collection ("buildings") and two encodings, GeoJSON and HTML.

The buildings have a few (optional) properties: the polygon geometry of the building footprint, a name, the function of the building (residential, commercial or public use), the floor count and the timestamp of the last update of the building feature in the dataset.

In addition to the examples included in the document, additional and more comprehensive examples are available at http://schemas.opengis.net/ogcapi/features/part1/1.0/examples.

A server that implements this conformance class provides access to the features in a dataset. In other words, the API is a distribution of that dataset. A file download, for example, would be another distribution.

The entry point is a Landing page (path /).

The Landing page provides links to:

The API definition describes the capabilities of the server that can be used by clients to connect to the server or by development tools to support the implementation of servers and clients. Accessing the API definition using HTTP GET returns a description of the API. The API definition can be hosted on the API server(s) or a separate server.

The Conformance declaration states the conformance classes from standards or community specifications, identified by a URI, that the API conforms to. Clients can but are not required to use this information. Accessing the Conformance declaration using HTTP GET returns the list of URIs of conformance classes implemented by the server.

The data is organized into one or more collections. Collections provides information about and access to the collections.

This document specifies requirements only for collections consisting of features. That is, each collection considered by this document is a feature collection. Other OGC API standards may add requirements for other types of collections.

This standard does not include any requirements about how the features in the dataset have to be aggregated into collections. A typical approach is to aggregate by feature type but any other approach that fits the dataset or the applications using this distribution may also be used.

Accessing Collections using HTTP GET returns a response that contains at least the list of collections. For each Collection, a link to the items in the collection (Features, path /collections/{collectionId}/items, link relation items) as well as key information about the collection. This information includes:

The Collection resource is available at path /collections/{collectionId}, too, often with more details than included in the Collections response.

Each Collection that is a feature collection consists of features. This document only discusses the behavior of feature collections.

Each feature in a dataset is part of exactly one collection.

Accessing the Features using HTTP GET returns a document consisting of features in the collection. The features included in the response are determined by the server based on the query parameters of the request. To support access to larger collections without overloading the client, the API supports paged access with links to the next page, if more features are selected than the page size.

A bbox or datetime parameter may be used to select only a subset of the features in the collection (the features that are in the bounding box or time interval). The bbox parameter matches all features in the collection that are not associated with a location, too. The datetime parameter matches all features in the collection that are not associated with a time stamp or interval, too.

The limit parameter may be used to control the subset of the selected features that should be returned in the response, the page size.

Each page may include information about the number of selected and returned features (numberMatched and numberReturned) as well as links to support paging (link relation next).

Each Feature (path /collections/{collectionId}/items/{featureId}) is also a separate resource and may be requested individually using HTTP GET.

In addition to the simple path structures described above, where all features are organized in a one-level collection hierarchy, additional parts of the OGC API Feature series are expected to provide alternate access to the features served by the API via additional, deeper collection hierarchies.

This includes the correct use of status codes, headers, etc.

Supporting the method HEAD in addition to GET can be useful for clients and is simple to implement.

Servers implementing CORS will implement the method OPTIONS, too.

If a server wants to support vendor specific parameters, these have to be explicitly declared in the API definition.

If OpenAPI is used to represent the API definition, a capability exists to allow additional parameters without explicitly declaring them. That is, parameters that have not been explicitly specified in the API definition for the operation will be ignored.

Note that the name of the parameter does not matter as the actual query parameters are the names of the object properties. For example, assume that the value of vendorSpecificParameters is this object:

In the request URI this would be expressed as &my_first_parameter=some%20value&my_other_parameter=42.

This is a general rule that applies to all parameters, whether they are specified in this document or in additional parts. A value is invalid if it violates the API definition or any other constraint for that parameter stated in a requirement.

Entity tags are a mechanism for web cache validation and for supporting conditional requests to reduce network traffic. Entity tags are specified by HTTP/1.1 (RFC 2616).

Access to data from a HTML page is by default prohibited for security reasons, if the data is located on another host than the webpage ("same-origin policy"). A typical example is a web-application accessing feature data from multiple distributed datasets.

Two common mechanisms to support cross-origin requests are:

While OGC API Features does not specify any mandatory encoding, support for the following encodings is recommended. See Clause 6 (Overview) for a discussion.

Requirement /req/core/http implies that the encoding of a server response is determined using content negotiation as specified by the HTTP RFC.

The section Media Types includes guidance on media types for encodings that are specified in this document.

Note that any server that supports multiple encodings will have to support a mechanism to mint encoding-specific URIs for resources in order to express links, for example, to alternate representations of the same resource. This document does not mandate any particular approach how this is supported by the server.

As clients simply need to dereference the URI of the link, the implementation details and the mechanism how the encoding is included in the URI of the link are not important. Developers interested in the approach of a particular implementation, for example, to manipulate ("hack") URIs in the browser address bar, can study the API definition.

If the server supports representing resources in multiple languages, the usual HTTP content negotiation mechanisms apply. The client states its language preferences in the Accept-Language header of a request and the server responds with responses that have linguistic text in the language that best matches the requested languages and the capabilities of the server.

For example, if JSON-LD is used as an encoding, the built-in capabilities to annotate a string with its language should be used.

The link object based on RFC 8288 (Web Linking) includes a hreflang attribute that can be used to state the language of the referenced resource. This can be used to include links to the same data in, for example, English or French. Just like with multiple encodings a server that wants to use language-specific links will have to support a mechanism to mint language-specific URIs for resources in order to express links to, for example, the same resource in another language. Again, this document does not mandate any particular approach how such a capability is supported by the server.

As discussed in Chapter 9 of the W3C/OGC Spatial Data on the Web Best Practices document, how to express and share the location of features in a consistent way is one of the most fundamental aspects of publishing geographic data and it is important to be clear about the coordinate reference system that coordinates are in.

For the reasons discussed in the Best Practices, OGC API Features uses WGS 84 longitude and latitude as the default coordinate reference system.

Implementations compliant with the Core are not required to support publishing feature geometries in coordinate reference systems other than http://www.opengis.net/def/crs/OGC/1.3/CRS84 (for coordinates without height) or http://www.opengis.net/def/crs/OGC/0/CRS84h (for coordinates with height); i.e., the (optional) third coordinate number is always the height.

The Core also does not specify a capability to request feature geometries in a different coordinate reference system. Such a capability will be specified in another part of the OGC API Features series.

This clause specifies four pre-defined requirements classes for encodings to be used by a OGC API Features implementation. These encodings are commonly used encodings for spatial data on the web:

None of these encodings are mandatory and an implementation of the Core requirements class may also implement none of them but implement another encoding instead.

The Core requirements class includes recommendations to support HTML and GeoJSON as encodings, where practical. Clause 6 (Overview) includes a discussion about recommended encodings.

Geographic information that is only accessible in formats like GeoJSON or GML has two issues:

Therefore, sharing data on the Web should include publication in HTML. To be consistent with the Web, it should be done in a way that enables users and search engines to access all data.

This is discussed in detail in Best Practice 2: Make your spatial data indexable by search engines [SDWBP]. This standard therefore recommends supporting HTML as an encoding.

GeoJSON is a commonly used format that is simple to understand and well supported by tools and software libraries. Since most Web developers are comfortable with using a JSON-based format supporting GeoJSON is recommended, if the feature data can be represented in GeoJSON for the intended use.

Templates for the definition of the schemas for the GeoJSON responses in OpenAPI definitions are available at featureCollectionGeoJSON.yaml and featureGeoJSON.yaml. These are generic schemas that do not include any application schema information about specific feature types or their properties.

In addition to HTML and GeoJSON, a significant volume of feature data is available in XML-based formats, notably GML. Therefore, this standard specifies requirements classes for GML. The Simple Features Profile, Level 0, is the simplest profile of GML and is typically supported by tools.

The GML Simple Features Profile is restricted to data with 2D geometries with linear/planar interpolation (points, line strings, polygons). In addition, the Level 0 profile is limited to features that can be stored in a tabular data structure.

The namespace prefixes used above and in the OGC API Features Core XML schemas are:

The mapping of the content from the responses specified in the Core requirements class to the XML is straightforward. All links have to be encoded as HTTP header Link.

See sub-clause 6.3 for links to example responses in XML.

The difference between this requirements class and the Level 0 requirements class is that non-spatial feature properties are not restricted to atomic values (strings, numbers, etc.).

Servers conforming to this requirements class define their API by an OpenAPI Document.

The requirements /req/core/root-success and /req/core/api-definition-success in Core require that the API definition documents are referenced from the landing page.

OpenAPI definitions can be created using different approaches. A typical example is the representation of the feature collections. One approach is to use a path parameter collectionId, i.e., the API definition has only a single path entry for all feature collections. Another approach is to explicitly define each feature collection in a separate path and without a path parameter, which allows to specify filter parameters or explicit feature schemas per feature collection. Both approaches are valid.

Note that servers that, for example, are access-controlled (see Security), support web cache validation, CORS or that use HTTP redirection will make use of additional HTTP status codes beyond regular codes such as 200 for successful GET requests and 400, 404 or 500 for error situations. See HTTP status codes.

Clients have to be prepared to receive responses not documented in the OpenAPI definition. For example, additional errors may occur in the transport layer outside of the server.

The OpenAPI specification currently supports the following security schemes:

APIs deliver a representation of a resource. OGC APIs can deliver multiple representations (formats) of the same resource. An attacker may find that information which is prohibited in one representation can be accessed through another. API designers must take care that the access controls on their resources are implemented consistently across all representations. That does not mean that they have to be the same. For example, consider the following.

Bottom Line: the information content of the resources exposed by an API must be protected to the same level across all access routes.

The implementation of an API may span a number of servers. Each server is an entry point into the API. Without careful management, information which is not accessible though one server may be accessible through another.

Bottom Line: Understand the information flows through your API and verify that information is properly protected along all access paths.

RFC-2626 section 15.2 states “If an HTTP server translates HTTP URIs directly into file system calls, the server MUST take special care not to serve files that were not intended to be delivered to HTTP clients.” The threat is that an attacker could use the HTTP path to access sensitive data, such as password files, which could be used to further subvert the server.

Bottom Line: Validate all GET URLs to make sure they are not trying to access resources they should not have access to.

A transaction operation adds new or updates existing resources on the API. This capability provides a whole new set of tools to an attacker.

Many of the resources exposed though an OGC API include hyperlinks to other resources. API clients follow these hyperlinks to access new resources or alternate representations of a resource. Once a client authenticates to an API, they tend to trust the data returned by that API. However, a resource posted by an attacker could contain hyperlinks which contain an attack. For example, the link to an alternate representation could require the client to re-authenticate prior to passing them on to the original destination. The client sees the representation they asked for and the attacker collects the clients’ authentication credentials.

Bottom Line: APIs which support transaction operations should validate that an update does not contain any malignant content prior to exposing it through the API.

OGC API Features is not a Web Service in the traditional sense. Rather, it defines the behavior and content of a set of Resources exposed through a Web Application Programing Interface (Web API). Therefore, an API may expose resources in addition to those defined by the standard. A test engine must be able to traverse the API, identify and validate test points, and ignore resource paths which are not to be tested.