Overview
OGC API - Connected Systems exposes sensors, the things they observe, and the commands sent to them as web resources.
The standard is published in two parts. Part 1: Feature Resources defines how to describe and discover the systems that produce data — their identifiers, metadata, deployment context, and the things they sample. Part 2: Dynamic Data defines how observations and tasking commands flow to and from those systems in real time and historically.
Part 1 — Feature Resources
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Systems
Anything that produces data or accepts commands — a sensor, a platform, a process, a simulation, or a human observer. Systems may be nested (a satellite carries instruments which carry detectors) and have a lifecycle of Deployments.
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Procedures
The methodology a System implements: the model of a sensor, a survey protocol, an algorithm. Procedures describe what a System is capable of, independent of any specific deployment.
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Deployments
A specific instance of a System operating at a place and time — a buoy moored at a station, a UAV flown on a sortie, an instrument installed on a tower.
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Sampling Features
The geometry that links what a System measured to where and how it measured it: a sampling point, curve, surface, or volume in the real world.
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Features of Interest
The real-world thing being observed or acted upon — a river reach, a building, an aircraft, a parcel of atmosphere.
Part 2 — Dynamic Data
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Datastreams & Observations
A Datastream is the channel through which a System publishes Observations of a property of a Feature of Interest. Datastreams expose both the historical archive (paged, filtered, time-windowed) and the live stream (HTTP long-poll, WebSocket, or MQTT) under one model.
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ControlStreams & Commands
The tasking counterpart to Datastreams. A ControlStream is the channel through which Commands are issued to a System; the standard defines command lifecycle, status reporting, and the same multi-protocol delivery model as Datastreams.
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SWE Common & SensorML encodings
Observation payloads and System descriptions are encoded with the OGC SWE Common data model and SensorML — self-describing, schema-driven encodings that capture units, uncertainties, quality flags, and processing lineage so consumers can interpret data without out-of-band documentation.
See the OGC API - Connected Systems landing page for the full specification index, conformance classes, and links to the published OpenAPI definitions. Browse the source on GitHub .
