OGC Table Joining Service
I have recently learned about an upcoming OGC standard that looks interesting: The Table Joining Service (formerly known as the Geographic Linkage Service or GLS). It standardizes a solution to the very common problem of mapping statistical data that is geographically related but maintained outside a GIS. To do that, the service uses a key (for example, a country or zip code) common to the statistical dataset and a geographic dataset providing the geometries.