Standards for Geographic Information and Services

1. Standards for Geographic Information and Services Status and Overview of Relevant Standards and their Implementation Douglas Nebert, GSDI/FGDC

2. Why Geo Standards? • Standardization lets peers communicate • Minimizes cost of uptake of new information • Maximizes utility and stability of information products • Permits more applications to operate under known conditions

3. Roles of Consensus Organizations • ISO provides general purpose standards and specifications as guidance to implementation • Industry Consortia provide technical implementation specifications • National/Community groups define common practices, content, and interaction within and outside the group

4. Introduction to Standardization Organizations • Many standardization activities exist with different roles and responsibilities that are relevant to implementing SDIs: • International Organisation of Standardization (ISO TC 211, TC 204, JTC-1) • World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) • OpenGIS Consortium (OGC) • National Standards Organizations

5. Software interfaces (Implementation Specifications) Regional SDI Coordination Endorsed practices and specifications OpenGIS Consortium, W3C Other NSDIs SDI ISO TC 211 National Standards Content standards, Authority for data Foundations for implementation. (Abstract standards) Geospatial Standardization GSDI

6. ISO Technical Committee 211... ... has the objective to develop a family of international standards that will: • support the understanding and usage of geographic information • increase the availability, access, integration, and sharing of geographic information, enable inter-operability of geospatially enabled computer systems • contribute to a unified approach to addressing global ecological and humanitarian problems • ease the establishment of geospatial infrastructures on local, regional and global level • contribute to sustainable development

7. Who are we ? TC-211 Primary Member List Australia Austria Belgium Canada China Czech Rep. Denmark Finland Germany Hungary Italy Japan Republic of Korea Malaysia Morocco New Zealand Norway Portugal Russian Federation Saudi Arabia South Africa Spain Sweden Switzerland Thailand Turkey United Kingdom United States of America Yugoslavia

8. Observing and Corresponding TC211 Member list Argentina Bahrain (corr.) Brunei Darussalam (corr.) Colombia Cuba Estonia (corr.) France Greece Hong Kong (corr.) Iceland India Isl. Rep. of Iran Ireland Jamaica Kenya Mauritius Netherlands Oman Pakistan Philippines Poland Slovakia Slovenia Tanzania Ukraine Uruguay Zimbabwe

9. ISO TC211 Work Items

10. Relevant ISO TC 211 standards • 19109 Rules for Application Schema • 19110 Methodology for Feature Cataloguing • 19115 Metadata (Data) • 19119 Services (Metadata) • 19128 Web Map Services (WMS) • 19138Geography Markup Language (GML)

11. World Wide Web Consortium • Mission: “to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability.” • A Recommendation is work that represents consensus within W3C and has the Director's stamp of approval. W3C considers that the ideas or technology specified by a Recommendation are appropriate for widespread deployment and promote W3C's mission. • Such specifications developed within W3C must be formally approved by the Membership. Consensus is reached after a specification has proceeded through the review stages of Working Draft, Proposed Recommendation, and Recommendation.

12. HTML HTTP PNG SOAP/XMLP SVG URI/URL XHTML XLink XML XML Query XML Schema XPath XPointer XSL and XSLT CSS DOM W3C Contributions

13. OpenGIS Consortium OGC Vision A world in which everyone benefits fromgeographic information and services made available across any network, application, or platform. OGC Mission Our core mission is to deliverspatial interface specificationsthat are openly available for global use. • Focus on interoperability of software at the interface level to promote plug-and-play components for geographic information interchange • Not-for-profit, international consortium • 220+ industry, government, NGO and university members

14. OGC Specifications • Simple Features Access (SQL, CORBA, OLE) • Catalog Services • Grid Coverages • Coordinate Transformation Services • Web Map Server Interfaces • Geography Markup Language • Web Feature Service • Filter Encoding Specification • Styled Layer Descriptor

15. Class A liaison OGC: Web Map Server, Web Feature Server, GML, Web Coverage Server, Style Layer Descriptor, Catalog Service XML Protocol (XMLP), XML Signature, I18N Class C Liaison: XML, I18N W3C: HTTP, PNG, RDF, SOAP/XMLP (Web Services Activity), XML, Xlink, Xpath, Xpointer, XSL/XSLT, XML Schema ISO: Ref Model, Terminology, Conformance testing, Profiles, Spatial Schema, Temporal Schema, Feature Cataloguing Methodology, Spatial Ref by Coords and Ids, Quality, Metadata, WMS, GML, LBS, Registration of Geo-information Items Review & approve stds. Provide expertise & candidate stds. Metadata Profile, Data Content Standards, etc. Establish definition of and terms of engagement in *SDI Interactions OpenGIS Consortium (OGC) Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) ISO TC 211 TC 204 World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) JTC-1 Facilitation Bodies • GSDI • ANZLIC • PCGIAP • FGDC • PC-IDEA • INSPIRE • GeoConnections • CODI/UNECA • AGI • … National Standards Organizations Adopter/ Implementer Community

16. Community Coordination • National coordination bodies provide a forum for agreement on the common adoption of a suite of standards and practices that as a whole will function as a Spatial Data Infrastructure • The Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) initiative seeks to promote compatible SDIs worldwide

17. Scope of National Solutions • Content Standards for Fundamental Data • Feature Type Catalogs • Standard Data Models for Exchange • Unique Identifiers on Features • Place names (Digital Gazetteer) • Geodetic Reference Systems • National Information Profiles of International Standards (ISO) • Data Policies and Laws

18. Navigating many choices • Standardization should be a least-cost means of establishing a common means of interaction between participants in a process • Community facilitators can play a critical role in building consensus on a requirements-based architecture and then specifying the context of relevant standards, specs, and practices to be adopted

19. The players OpenGIS Consortium (OGC) World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ISO Adopter/ Implementer Community National Standards National Organizations NSDI blueprint Users Policies, Agreements, Technologies Coordination

20. A blueprint for SDI • Metadata for data and services • Data content standards (UML models) for exchange of individual data themes • Data formats for file archiving, download • Data encoding for the Web (XML/GML) • OGC Spatial Web Services Specifications: • Web Map Services • Web Feature Services • Draft Gazetteer Profile of WFS (Placename Service) • Catalog Services (Clearinghouse)

21. Activities and Standards in SDI ISO 19115, 19119, 19139 OGC Catalog Services W3C XML OGC GML Metadata Catalog http, Z39.50 Data Production GAZ Web Services WMS Formats http Data User WFS ftp, CD Data Services Formats ISO Feature Catalog SDTS, VPF, … National/Intl Content Standards Internet

22. Needs and Opportunities • Informing potential adopters about relevant standards and their implementation • Translating documents into languages and for specific application areas • Promoting a logical architecture for the interaction of standards-based systems • Building and sharing common feature catalogs, data content, and data exchange standards for files and the Web

23. Questions • What is the best mechanism to share standards information in the Americas? • How do we improve the uptake of relevant standards? • How do we effectively educate people on the construction of compatible SDIs? • What are the common research items that will advance SDI?