OGC seeking Public Comment on Deprecation of v1.0 of the Geographic Information - Well Known Text Representation of Coordinate Reference Systems Standard

Comments are due by September 5, 2022. There have been two generations of Well-known text (WKT) representing Coordinate Reference System (CRS) definitions:

• The first generation was documented over 20 years ago by a number of organizations, including OGC through the Simple Features and Coordinate Transformation Service specifications. Numerous flavors of this generation exist, which are referred to colloquially as “CRS WKT1.”
• The “CRS WKT2” specification that’s conformant with Abstract Specification Topic 2, Referencing by coordinates. There have been two versions of this WKT2 standard:
• OGC document 12-063, "Well Known Text Representation of Coordinate Reference Systems" (WKT CRS) version 1.0, which is conformant with Topic 2 (OGC document 08-015) and ISO 19111:2007. It was published in 2015 and submitted to ISO TC / 211 for publication in the same year (ISO 19162:2015).
• OGC document 18-010, "Well Known Text Representation of Coordinate Reference Systems" (WKT CRS) version 2.0, conformant with revised Topic 2 (OGC document 18-005) and ISO 19111:2019. The revision was primarily to add support for dynamic CRSs and other advances in geodesy. This revision of WKT2 was also submitted to ISO TC / 211 for publication (ISO 19162:2019).

Based on the limitations of CRS WKT1 and WKT2 v1.0, OGC issued Policy Directive 46 in September 2019 requiring all new OGC Standards that require CRS support to reference CRS WKT2 version 2.0 (18-010r7). The maintainers of the Standard, the CRS Standards Working Group (SWG) have assessed that the data and software environments in the geospatial community now rely upon CRSs that cannot be adequately defined using CRS WKT2 v1.0 and thus recommend that the Standard (12-063r5) be deprecated.

Per OGC policy, a deprecated Standard is no longer supported (no longer receives updates and OGC may not provide technical support on the Standard). The Standard is marked as deprecated, but still made available on the OGC website to assist developers in migrating to the new version. OGC takes great diligence in notifying the community of a proposed deprecation and requests comments regarding this proposed action, including any evidence for why the Standard should not be deprecated.