Finding Building Blocks

Whilst components described as Building Blocks may be referenced by individual specifications, due to evolution of the specification publication process over time this is not consistent in terms of identification or disposition of published artefacts. Such components may be published as discrete resources, or bundled in larger packages. They may or may not be in consistent machine-readable forms. This leads to many challenges for discovery of such components. General text search options may assist, but will be subject to limited ability to precisely recall only relevant components.

The OGC Building Block Framework provides three improved approaches for discovery:

  1. Registers
  2. RAINBOW (OGC Knowledge Graph)
  3. Transparent Dependencies
  4. The meta-register catalog

The OGC Blocks meta-register is the tool for finding building blocks across the whole ecosystem, not just one register at a time: it crawls every register it knows about and indexes it into a single searchable, browsable catalog — organization → register → block — with keyword and semantic search, and reverse-dependency lookups (which registers/blocks depend on a given one) that no single register’s own viewer can show. For tooling and AI agents, the same catalog is available programmatically via a REST API (interactive docs, OpenAPI description) and an MCP server.

This is still a development project. The deployment above is a dev instance, and its URL is expected to change once a production (“definitive”) register is available — stay tuned.

Well-known Building Blocks registers

OGC Specifications

OGC Specifications (in development)

Incubator

Projects