GIS Files 6: Expert GIS concepts

6.2: Standards (1)

Introduction

Standards are a fundamental part of modern society; an organised way for ensuring best practice, common design, safety and many other benefits across every field of industry and science. A series of bodies exist to coordinate and promote the generation of standards. These bodies now play a crucial role in geographic information (GI) science.

ISO, the International Organisation for Standardisation, is very active in the field of standards for GI. The ISO Technical Committee – TC 211 – is in the process of producing standards for many aspects of spatial data, including metadata; spatial referencing by coordinates; imagery and gridded data; and data quality. For more details of ISO, and especially ISO/TC 211, visit the TC 211 official website.

TC 211 official website

BSI, the British Standards Institution, is the oldest national standards setting body in the world, including BS 7567 (aka NTF) and BS 7666 (Spatial data-sets for geographical referencing) – see the Gazetteers page. Ordnance Survey is involved with the BSI's technical committee – IST/36 – which is responsible for the UK participation in the area of GI in international committees.

More recently, OGC, the Open GIS Consortium, has been established. OGC is an expanding organisation dedicated to the creation of standards in the field of interoperable geospatial systems. The membership includes most of the GIS and database vendors, several major spatial data users and a few spatial data producers. OGC develops interface specifications for geospatial data and systems, and is increasingly involved in prototyping services for serving and accessing spatial data over the Internet. One of the key areas of activity is encouraging the adoption of standard formats for geographic data exchange based on eXtensible Markup Language (XML) – see the XML and GML page. The OGC public web site contains a wealth of information about these activities.

< 6.1: Data formats (4) | 6.2: Standards (2) >