.. _ows_services_overview: OWS Services Overview ===================== The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) defines of series of web protocols that all follow a similar design. The OGC Open Web Services (OWS) define a service using: * Service * Version * Request - a service GeoServer provides a framework for accepting these requests and dispatching them to the appropriate implementation. The services are configured for the Dispatcher using a Spring applicationContext.xml file included in your jar.