Formal standards organizations
To get standing with ANSI, you MUST be an organization of professionals, not just a coalition of companies. So, an organization petitions to the standing committees of ANSI, like X.25, to create a group working on a topic. This works hierarchically, a country standards organization can petition to ISO to create an ISO committee, then ISO asks the other countries to nominate national members, and ANSI asks organizations to nominate members, etc. lots of bureaucracy, all unpaid!
Government approach:
NIST National Institute of Standards and Technology (was National
Bureau of Standards; was Bureau of Weights and Measures)
NIST can create standards for Federal agencies, such as FIPS
FIPS Federal Information Processing Standards (eg. FIPS 173...)
SI (Système Internationale or metric system) was originally
a government system promulgated by Napoléon Bonaparte...
CEN European Committee for Standardization (Comité Européen
des Normes). The European Union relies on a bureaucratic effort
to standardize EVERYTHING. CEN become requirements to all member
states.
Industry standards:
1996- Open GIS Foundation, Inc. proposes software specifications
for interoperability (much more than file/data standards). Members
include a lot of the big players in software industry.
There is a standard for standards: Sections read like this
Scope and Field of Application, Conformance, References, Definitions,
main body...
De facto standards: created by customary use and reliance
(the real standards)
CAD world has de facto standards due to dominance of specific
software packages:
Intergraph Standard Interchange File (SIF) at high end (internal
IGDF)
(Intergraph has recently tried to make their formats open)
Auto-CAD DXF (an ascii format) at low end. [neither have a lot
of structure]
USGS has Digital Line Graphs (DLG) as a topological format.
ARC/INFO has an export format .E00, but the internal structures
are proprietary...
Arc View established a shape file standard that is openly disseminated.
In the beginning was National Map Accuracy Standard...
1940 American Society for Photogrammetry (now ASP and Remote Sensing)
produced a draft standard for map accuracy. This was proposed
to the federal government, which had come to rely upon aerial
photography for a lot of mapping (starting with TVA, then the
war)
1947 National Map Accuracy Standard (NMAS) adopted by Bureau of
the Budget
reinterpreted into statistical form by ACIC for bomb accuracy
studies...
ACIC was the Advanced Cartography Information Center inside the
Army Map Service (AMS) long since part of Defense Mapping Agency
(DMA), now NIMA or GIA?
NMAS covers only positional error for well-defined points.
1982 National Committee for Digital Cartographic Data Standards
(NCDCDS) created by American Congress on Surveying and Mapping
(professional organization) because US Geological Survey (USGS)
National Mapping Division (NMD) asked ACSM to create a standard
for 'digital cartographic data exchange' to respond to general
request from National Bureau of Standards for 'geoscience standards'.
Canadian Council on Surveying and Mapping withdraws draft to await
US effort.
1983 due to the General Accounting Office report on Duplicative
Federal Mapping, the Office of Management and Budget revisits
A-16, the mandate controlling mapping efforts. A Federal Interagency
Coordinating Committee for Digital Cartography (FICCDC) is created.
Interior is named lead and USGS NMD operates it subject to some
internal squabbling with Bureau of Land Management... FICCDC was
also charged with creating standards. (see the abortive FGEF)
1989? FICCDC renames itself to Federal Geographic Data Committee
(FGDC),
NMD still in charge.
SDTS (US National Standard: FIPS 173) Spatial Data Transfer Standard
generated by NCDCDS for USGS, reworked by FGDC Working Group and
adopted by NIST as FIPS 173
Working Group on Data Organization chaired by T. Nyerges, Federal
Register Dec 90
Uses ISO 8211 (a self-describing interchange encoding scheme)
as a vehicle.
Includes Data Quality Specification (virtually unaltered from
NCDCDS)
1986 UK Working Party to produce national transfer standards,
an informal group organized by Ordnance Survey (OS). National
Transfer Standard adopted 1990?
ATKIS German cadastral mapping standard, specifies everything,
schema, proceedures, but no software can really do it...
1994 FGDC adopts Content Standards for Geospatial Metadata (incompatible
w. SDTS)
1980s Digital Geographic Information Working Group (DGIWG) created
by NATO, representatives of military mapping organizations (inlcuding
Australia, etc.)
1991 DIGEST the military (NATO) transfer standard. adopted by
French IGN based on ISO 8211 (version A) or ISO 8824(B)
VPF Vector Product Format: designed for DMA Digital Chart of the
World. adopted by DGIWG as DIGEST-C. Not an exchange standard,
but a format for direct use of database from CD-ROM.
1994 Spatial Archive and Interchange Format (SAIF) adopted by
Canadians, submitted to ISO as a part of SQL/MM (multi-media)
standard! ...
1994/6 TC287 of CEN draft stadards, related to ISO process...
1997 CEN adopts first parts of standards (for Data and Reference model) BUT these standards do not seem to be freely accessible (posting on discusion list)
1998 ISO TC211 has been working on GIS standards, on an impetus from Canada, though in practice, the CEN TC287 process has been very closely linked... (newsletter article about the common use of EXPRESS data modeling language; links date from 1998, so they have vanished...)
Open GIS Consortium (private industry based group?) places focus on interoperability, not data transfer. The process at OGC goes through a series of stages from "abstract specification" toward implementations.
ISO TC 211 (Geomatics) has a host of standards that resulted in 2001, 2002 and 2003. (more to come?).
2001 ISO TC 211 and OGC are connected, in that the OGC "abstract specification" for Metadata is also the ISOTC211 DIS 19115.
ISO 19113 Quality Principles and ISO 19114 Quality Evaluation are available on the ISO web site, but cost 108 CHF (about $80 at the current ruinous rates of exchange).
Abstract (from the ISO site)
ISO 19113:2002 establishes the principles for describing the quality of geographic data and specifies components for reporting quality information. It also provides an approach to organizing information about data quality.
ISO 19113:2002 is applicable to data producers providing quality information to describe and assess how well a dataset meets its mapping of the universe of discourse as specified in the product specification, formal or implied, and to data users attempting to determine whether or not specific geographic data is of sufficient quality for their particular application. This International Standard should be considered by organizations involved in data acquisition and purchase, in such a way that it makes it possible to fulfil the intentions of the product specification. It can additionally be used for defining application schemas and describing quality requirements.
As well as being applicable to digital geographic data, the principles of ISO 19113:2002 can be extended to identify, collect and report the quality information for a geographic dataset, its principles can be extended and used to identify, collect and report quality information for a dataset series or smaller groupings of data that are a subset of a dataset.
Although ISO 19113:2002 is applicable to digital geographic data, its principles can be extended to many other forms of geographic data such as maps, charts and textual documents.
ISO 19113:2002 does not attempt to define a minimum acceptable level of quality for geographic data.
Public comment period for ISO 19113 was Jan-March 2003 (no comments?)
(it never ends)