A Guide to the Role of Standards in Geospatial Information Management

A standard is a documented agreement between provider and consumers, established by consensus, that provides rules, guidelines, or characteristics ensuring materials, products, and services are fit for purpose. Behind the scenes, standards make everyday life work. They may establish size or shape or capacity of a product, process, or system. They can specify performance of products or personnel. They can also define terms so that there is no misunderstanding among those using the standard.

In 1904, much of the City of Baltimore in the United States was destroyed by a massive fire. Firefighters from hundreds of kilometers away were sent to assist Baltimore firefighters during the height of the blaze. They could do little to help because the fire hose size and threads used by different responders were not standardized for compatibility with Baltimore fire hydrants ^[3]. The resultant inability to connect hoses to fire hydrants turned hundreds of firefighters into spectators. This analogy rings true not just in respect of the need to share geospatial information, such as disaster imagery, during a crisis but throughout all implementations of geospatial technologies. Standards make uniformity, compatibility, and interoperability possible for electronic devices, software applications, and processes in all sectors of a global economy.

Without standards, the ability to connect systems, data, people, hardware, software, and procedures becomes difficult and inefficient. Loss of time, assets and lives is inevitable.

A recent example of the value of standards was brought to the surface by the COVID-19 pandemic. Addresses provide one of the most common and unambiguous ways to identify and locate objects, and assist services such as postal delivery, emergency response, marketing, mapping, utility planning and land administration. Addresses and address data turned out to be crucial in the fight against COVID-19 because they enabled contact tracing and identification of cluster outbreaks. Non-standardized addresses significantly hinder the response to COVID-19. The multi-part International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 19160 Addressing Standard supports a variety of stakeholders so that accurate and reliable address data can be made available. The different parts of ISO 19160 cover topics such as terminology and a conceptual data model for addressing; good practices for address assignment and maintenance; quality of address data; and international postal addressing (jointly developed with the Universal Postal Union).

Open standards facilitate interoperability and data exchange among different products or services intended for widespread adoption. Standards and specifications define requirements to ensure that products and data are consistent in accuracy, structure, format, style, and content. ^[4] Standards development is a process that requires consensus among stakeholders. Open standards are a central element in the growing trend towards effective government.

Open international standards are voluntary consensus-driven standards published by the SDOs. Open standards ^[5] are developed, approved, and maintained via a collaborative and consensus-driven process and made available to the general public. These standards are aimed at achieving legal, data, semantic and/or technical interoperability. Furthermore, open standards offer users the opportunity to have a voice in building and learning about the standards. Apart from standards, the SDOs offer other types of open documents and services, such as specifications and reports, to respond to urgent market needs or to address work still under technical development.

The main focus of the IGIF SP6 and this Guide is on open international geospatial standards. However, other means of information sharing that may lead to or supplement standards are also described in this subsection:

Specifications generally offer an interoperability solution similar to that of standards, but are not necessarily developed in the same voluntary, consensus-based process. Specifications may precede or contribute to the body of knowledge for new open standards, thus serving a meaningful role in furthering innovation in the geospatial industry. ^[6] In the case of the OGC, output from the OGC Innovation Program initiatives may result in draft specifications for consideration for development as a standard. Further, open standards or specifications developed externally to the OGC may submitted to the OGC to become formally endorsed as OGC community standards.^[7]

Based on international standards, profiles may be established and endorsed by governance bodies to meet the specific needs of their country or organization. Metadata profiles, such as the INSPIRE dataset and service metadata, and the _Latin American Metadata Profile LAMP version 2 (LAMPv2) are examples of profiles based on international standards.

Good practices describe how an open standard is applied against scenarios or define a profile that tailors it to the requirements of a specific community. Good practices (also referred to as best or proven practices) often highlight the practical use of one or more standards and specifications or address particular use cases. They may relate to implementing tools and techniques, emerging technologies and standards, or extensions/profiles for specific application domains. ^[8]

Over time and with broad adoption, a specification may be so widely used that the community considers it a de facto standard for a given application, even if it was not assigned an official status by a governance body. Developers should be aware that some de facto standards require proprietary solutions to be licensed in order to implement them. De facto standards should balance interoperability, access, and use requirements and be used in parallel with open international or national standards when possible.^[9]

Closed standards or specifications carry risks that may pose hidden challenges such as delays and costs of expanding or adapting data and software tools to work with other resources, software, or organizations. Organizations should be aware of the potential risk to interoperability of closed standards or specifications and consider these risks on balance with the benefits. Open standards and specifications, on the other hand, help organizations best balance their needs while minimizing business and technology risks.

In an ever-changing world, open standards help assure that organizations can more quickly take advantage of new geospatial information sources and new technology tools. International standards developed and maintained by the consensus processes of recognized SDOs help avoid risk by broadly addressing and managing community requirements for interoperability, access, and use.

Geospatial information, technologies, and standards help enable and improve the sharing, integration, and application of geospatial information for decision making. While national governments can make proactive policy choices to maximize benefits, other jurisdictions and enterprises must align with this policy to achieve mutually optimal outcomes.

A multi-national response to a regional disaster is one example where having clear policy on the sharing of geospatial information is critically important. The shaping of appropriate geospatial policy is beyond the mandate of this Guide (See IGIF SP2), but it must be addressed. For without a suitable policy framework the standards-based approaches described in this Guide will be of limited value.

The remainder of this Guide seeks to answer the following questions directly related to the role of standards in geospatial information management:

In addition to these questions the overall value proposition associated with open standards should be considered by all stakeholders. The fundamental questions include quantifying the benefits, examining the reduction of related risks, as well as the potential for improved productivity and new opportunities.

Open standards facilitate increased return on geospatial investment through a host of mechanisms. Return on investment may be realized through direct means such as improved efficiency, from saved time and effort, or through the ability to rapidly mobilize new capabilities. The following examples demonstrate the monetary benefits of standardization:

The majority of international standards are developed in SDOs that use a consensus process guided by documented, repeatable and well proven policies and procedures. This helps ensure that the standards developed meet the needs of all users.

The three international organizations that participated in the development of this document share the objective of developing standards for geospatial information:

Additionally, the World Wide Web Consortium ( W3C) and Internet Engineering Task Force ( IETF) are examples of two SDOs that develop foundational standards which are increasingly important in contemporary geospatial applications based upon internet and web technologies. Amongst others, the American Society for Photogrammetry ( ASPRS) and the Geospatial and Remote Sensing Society ( GRSS) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers also play roles in geospatial standards development.

These international standards organizations have representative members from government, industry, research, non-government organizations and academia who arrive at decisions through a consensual process. The organizations develop, maintain, and make publicly available open standards that facilitate the ability to publish, discover, access, manage and use geospatial information across a range of applications, systems, and business enterprises.

To take advantage of emerging standards and trends, countries and organizations can leverage the global resources of groups such as the UN-GGIM, SDOs, and other major associations mentioned in this document to identify trends and to adopt good practices.

Organizations participate in standards development work of OGC, ISO/TC 211 and IHO to understand implications and assure earliest implementation of standards that will help ease integration of new technologies and data sources. Manyfold benefits can be achieved by formally joining or informally participating in an SDO. These benefits include:

At a minimum, organizations and institutions should consider providing their interoperability requirements to the OGC, ISO, and/or IHO. This does not require much time but ensures that these requirements are documented and considered in the ongoing development of international standards.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international consortium of geospatial experts from more than 500 businesses, government agencies, research organizations, and universities driven to make geospatial (location) information and services FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. OGC’s member-driven consensus process creates https://www.ogc.org/docs/is royalty free. OGC actively analyzes and anticipates emerging https://www.ogc.org/ogctechtrends tech trends, and runs an agile, collaborative Research and Development (R&D) lab - the OGC Innovation Program - that builds, tests and prototypes candidate standards to address community challenges. Membership details and benefits can be found at https://www.ogc.org/ogc/benefits

The ISO is a global network of national standards bodies. Members are the foremost standards organizations in their countries and there is only one member per country. Each member represents ISO in its country. Individuals or companies cannot become ISO members, but there are ways that you can https://www.iso.org/get-involved.html take part in standardization work, either through a national standards body (the member), or by becoming a liaison organization to an ISO committee, in the case of geographic information, this is ISO TC/211. Specific details can be found at https://committee.iso.org/home/tc211

The IHO is the inter-governmental technical and consultative organization that sets global standards for hydrography and nautical charting and provides global coordination and support for the world’s national hydrographic services. It is a recurring recommendation of the General Assembly of the UN and of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), that every coastal State should be a member of the IHO in order to meet its international obligations while maximizing the national economic benefits that accrue from a comprehensive national hydrographic program. More details can be found at https://iho.int/en/become-a-member-state

The W3C is an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. More details can be found at https://www.w3.org/

For further information on how to become a member or participate with these organizations please see their respective websites.

Organizations, institutions, and information communities are likely to be starting their standards journey at different points in the capability/maturity continuum, requiring a phased implementation approach that considers the different levels of experience and expertise of the people involved. ^[17] Collaborative initiatives to share and deliver geospatial information are typically oriented around SDI initiatives.

Standards for geospatial information can be seen as a continuum, enabling the achievement of increasing levels of interoperability of geospatial information as more standards are adopted and adapted to keep pace with evolving requirements, technologies, and tools.

Reaping the benefits of standards adoption is a journey and organizations, institutions and information communities are likely to be starting this journey at different points in the capability/maturity continuum. This guide provides a model for the phased implementation of geospatial standards that considers the different levels of experience and expertise of the players involved. Some organizations and institutions are far advanced, others are just beginning, and some are only considering the use of standards. Figure 1.5 describes several "Tiers" that convey a standardization trajectory where the levels of capability and scale of collaboration increase as knowledge and experience are gained.

Standards are a critical element of geospatial information management. In Figure 1.5, the trajectory for increasing levels of capability and collaboration is shown over four Tiers:

Decades of experience has shown that lack of consensus, leadership commitment, and a clear governance structure are the key factors limiting the full achievement of the benefits of open standards. Constrained funding, inadequate governance arrangements, a lack of understanding of the value proposition of using a standards-based approach and a lack of knowledge and experience in standards implementation are major limiting factors and are often related to a lack of consensus among stakeholders. With communication between stakeholders comes an exchange of knowledge and experience.

As consensus builds, understanding improves and the willingness of stakeholders to commit resources and coordinate activities in an open fashion grows. This facilitates a continuing, self-sustainable, and self- governed expansion of open standards. Single agency portrayal of basic information develops into collaborative multi-agency standards implementation that takes fuller advantage of emerging technological developments. Recognizing the complexity and constraints, it can be worthwhile to implement standards in an incremental fashion. Full interoperability can take time as an organization or institution matures in both technical and policy terms.

As the need for interoperability increases, more standards are adopted with increased maturity. Increased capability and scale of collaboration are associated with sets of standards being adopted, as shown in Figure 1.6.

The Tiers represent a series of steps in an organization’s ability to offer increasing levels of geospatial information and associated services as part of an information community. At the beginning of the process (Tier 1), an organization may want to provide access to geospatial information delivered as map images together with a description of them (i.e., metadata).

As an initiative matures, multiple organizations may wish to collaborate to provide a means to share, search, access, integrate and cooperatively maintain and use a particular geospatial information layer (such as transportation) from multiple sources using web services (Tier 2).

Larger scale initiatives have a goal of establishing a nation-wide coverage of foundation or framework^[18] data as part of their National SDI (NSDI). Foundation data is an accurate set of key geospatial data layers needed most by different users (imagery, elevation, administrative boundaries, transportation, land use, and water features for example). Providing access to this geospatial Foundation Data for a range of application areas is the next level of maturity (Tier 3).

Finally, to address emerging needs and leverage new technologies and opportunities such as crowdsourcing of geospatial information and big data analytics, a community would focus on delivering geospatial information from SDI environments to spatially enable the broader IT infrastructure (Tier 4).

The scale and scope of an initiative in terms of the number of stakeholders and the number of information communities are also presented in this diagram. At each Tier, as more stakeholders adopt standards, the scale of the initiative increases. Likewise, as initiatives move along the continuum from one Tier to the next, from single organization to information communities, the scale of interoperability grows, and the value proposition of standards adoption pays dividends.

The description of the Tiers provided later in this document identifies the specific suites of SDI standards that are used to achieve them, in the form of blocks that are stacked on top of each other. An Inventory of Standards (Appendix 1) provides details on the specific suite of standards associated with each Tier.

Feature catalogues are a common mechanism for enforcing semantic interoperability in geospatial information. Feature catalogues ^[19] describe the semantics of what is meant by 'Tower', so all consumers of the information agree, and what properties of the feature are important to describe it, such as height above ground, height above sea level, construction, or navigational marks (e.g., lights). The feature catalogue contains a record of all the features that are relevant within the organization or jurisdiction. The agreed understanding of what is relevant is known as the universe of discourse.

Ontologies and conceptual models are a means to describe a universe of discourse by describing and categorizing concepts, their properties, and relationships between them. Conceptual models are usually described in the UML and are useful for model-driven development and architectures. They are used to achieve semantic and structural interoperability. Ontologies are a key enabler for the Semantic Web, an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the W3C. To enable the encoding of semantics with the data, standards such as Resource Description Framework _(RDF) and Web Ontology Language _(OWL) are used. ^[20] For example, these technologies are used to formally represent metadata in Data Catalog Vocabulary _(DCAT) - a RDF vocabulary designed to facilitate semantic interoperability between data catalogs published on the Web. DCAT enables a publisher to describe datasets and data services in a catalog using a standard model and vocabulary that facilitates the consumption and aggregation of metadata from multiple catalogs.

Data standards are integral to the reuse and repurposing of information to achieve frictionless data supply chains. Having data that is interoperable means that systems and services that create, exchange, and consume data have clear, shared expectations of the contents, contexts and meaning of the data. In addition to promoting standardization for data sharing and reuse, interoperable data supports multidisciplinary knowledge integration, discovery, innovation, and productivity improvements. To be interoperable the data will need to use community-agreed formats, language, and vocabularies (building on the semantic interoperability described above). The metadata will also need to use standards and vocabularies and contain links to related information^[21].

Data integration is needed between and among the various geospatial data themes such as the relationship between a road and a boundary. Integration is also needed between geospatial data themes and geospatially referenced statistical data. Statistics are gathered and summarized according to the topic and point or area of interest. In a geospatial context, point locations and/or boundaries of these additional thematic areas are required to analyze and map the results.

The following are examples of data standards:

Application Programming Interfaces (API) are technology standardsthat specify how software components interact with each other through standard interfaces that enable different systems and services to work together seamlessly, saving time, effort, and cost. APIs are one way to reduce the dependency on implementation specifics and make code more reusable. Web services are another way to specify the interaction between computers. Using technology standards gives programmers the ability to later change the behavior of the system by simply swapping the component used with another. This, in turn, provides the flexibility to rapidly mobilize newer technologies and data sources in the future.

The word 'protocol' may mean different things to legal, scientific and computer science audiences. The word can be interpreted in many ways, but the intent is the same: to bring different parties together with a common understanding of a code of conduct in a given situation.

Examples of technology standards are:

Achieving these increasing levels of interoperability is driven by a desire to provide decision makers with access to a knowledge environment in which geospatial information is accessed and processed across the Web and in mobile environments. Thus, data about people, places and things are linked together to provide a deeper understanding of a given situation (such as a disaster, social, environmental, or economic phenomena).

A user must have the ability to easily discover new knowledge, information, or data to address their needs. For example, a researcher may have knowledge gaps and would be required to define the data or information needed to address the knowledge gap. The researcher may check for existing data, define the data/information gap, discover or collect the missing data. A navigator on the bridge of a ship needs to know the depth of the sea as part of planning and conduct of their voyage. He or she is aware of and can discover the depth (bathymetric) information regularly collected and made available digitally via standardized Electronic Navigational Charts published by Hydrographic Offices. A non-expert could also be interested in the planning of offshore wind farms and needs to find the relevant data - How can a non-expert know where to find and discover this data? Similarly, a web developer building a website or application may be unfamiliar with the domain-specific content data and would need to find relevant standards and information.

Data providers and users should be aware that there are many considerations around data needs, e.g.:

To address these needs organizations should consider adopting metadata, data, and technical standards relevant to their specific domain(s).

Needs can be expressed at different scales: from single to multiple organizations and information communities, for example local to national to global. At the organizational level, there is often a process in place to capture needs and gaps. Gaps and new needs can become part of an organization’s future information policy and annual information plan to be integrated into existing practice. At the regional and global level, regional commissions and international bodies can be established to get a clear overview of national responsibilities / priorities in both data collection and understanding the gaps in data observation and measurements.

This section provides guidance on how to understand the organizational and broader SDI standards needs and gaps, and how standards can address these potential needs and gaps. There are five recommended steps and associated tools that guide users to identify gaps in standards implementation or adoption, as well as determine their needs and priorities. These steps are applicable for all SDI regardless of which level of maturity or tier it is in. More details on suggested standards can be found in the Taking Action Section.

There is no intention to suggest that every standard listed in this chapter and in the Standards Inventory (Appendix 1) must be used at each Tier. Instead, these are meant as recommendations. The standards recommended in this Guide include the three general types of geospatial standards: (1) domain-specific standards, (2) general-purpose standards for geospatial information and technology specifically, and (3) general-purpose standards for information technologies and the internet generally, and also the three types of geospatial standards: (1) information (or content) standards, (2) service or interface standards and (3) procedural standards.

Within a portal context, the most basic requirement is to be able to easily and effectively access and display geospatial information that may be stored in one or more databases and may use different vendor solutions and storage formats. Hence, the functions of visualization and portrayal, and subsequently catalogue and discovery are important at this tier. As identified in IGIF SP6 Appendix 6.3, potential needs at this tier could include:

Therefore, the standards most widely implemented for Tier 1 are: OGC Web Map Service (WMS), _OGC Web Map Tile Service (WMTS), _OGC Keyhole Markup Language (KML), and OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) (also ISO 19136).

Associated with visualizing geospatial information may be the requirement to portray the information using an organization’s symbology or cartographic presentation rules. There are available OGC standards to enable the ability to code, communicate and share visualization rules , such as OGC Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD), _OGC Symbology Encoding, and _OGC Web Services Context (OWC). It is important to be aware that OGC web services while still broadly used worldwide are currently undertaking significant reform. The new OGC roadmap ^[22] focuses on the development of a family of _OGC APIs which will 'make it easy for anyone to provide geospatial data to the web'. These standards, built upon the legacy of the _OGC Web Service standards (WMS, WFS, etc.), define APIs to take advantage of modern web development practices.

Most organizations further enhance their capability to support geospatial information and service discovery as well as metadata creation and browsing functionality. Properly populated, standards-based metadata allows end-users. to determine if a specific set of information is "fit for purpose" for a particular use case. The key standard for metadata of geospatial resources which has been widely applied and adopted at regional and national levels is the ISO 19115-X series.

The ISO and OGC standards for catalogue and discovery are widely implemented in national, regional, and local SDIs. Most geospatial technology vendors, as well as open source solutions, support these standards. These standards should be implemented if the community requires the need to search metadata holdings for the geospatial information they require. The metadata catalogue or registry can be made available to services, including clients, using one of the OGC Catalogue Service-Web (CSW) profiles and/or the W3C DCAT data catalog vocabularies.

Once the desired geospatial information can be discovered and viewed as a seamless set of maps, then the infrastructure is mature enough to consider publishing content and transmitting data (content) to end users. In this Tier, the community and infrastructure have matured to the point that the services are stable and the community and partnerships are growing, requesting more functionality and capability. Potential organizational or SDI needs identified in IGIF SP6 Appendix 6.3 include:

For example, as more partners (public and private) wish to be part of a CoP to support collaborative sharing and maintenance of geospatial information content, the infrastructure of participating organizations will need to accommodate the use of additional international technology standards and community information model standards. At this stage, organizations would have to consider two of the three key types of geospatial standards:

An information model in software engineering is a representation of concepts and the relationships, constraints, rules, and operations to specify data semantics for a chosen domain of discourse, such as transportation, hydrology, or aviation. The goal of such models is to allow multiple stakeholders across many jurisdictions to have an agreement on how to express data for a specific domain, such as weather, geology, or land use. Such agreements significantly enhance interoperability and the ability to share geospatial information at any time and as required. For some time OGC Geography Markup Language / _ISO 19136 _(GML) Application Schemas and encoding has been the primary OGC/ISO standards-based approach used for modelling, encoding, and transporting geospatial information.

For geospatial information query and access, there are standards which allow the application and user to specify geographic and attribute queries and request that the geospatial information be returned as an encoding. Recommended standards to support this capability can be found in the Standards Inventory ( Appendix 1) and elaborated in the Taking Actions section later in this Guide.

Common distribution formats are GML, _ISO 8211 (used by _IHO S-57 and IHO S-100), OGC _GeoTiff. International open standards are better than proprietary or locally defined formats as they reduce costs and enhance collaboration with outside groups. There are also standard ways for requesting geospatial information, packaging that information, and transmitting the information. For example, if the user wants the transportation theme as a GML dataset or a chart in IHO _S-101 or S-57, then the server-based software needs to be able to generate the information in the requested formats. These requests for publication are performed using simple web calls. Distribution can be in any number of standard formats, such as GeoTIFF or GML files. The required data can be streamed from the server to the client application or for very large files can be uploaded to an ftp site or accessed through flexible web file sharing services (e.g., API) at any time.

In this Tier, the infrastructure is mature enough to: (1) provide access to multiple themes of information via a variety of environments (e.g., mobile, desktop); (2) support deployment of more applications to enhance value, provide increased citizen benefit, increase collaboration between organizations; and (3) integration of an increasing number of geospatial information resources, including volunteer, crowdsourced and real time sensor feeds. Completion of the needs assessment and gap analysis template described in IGIF SP6 Appendix 6.3 would have identified potential needs including:

Standards are available to facilitate implementation of geoprocessing and analytics services, grid systems, mobile applications: capturing and integrating real-time sensor data, and geosemantics. These trends are further elaborated in the 'Taking Action' chapter and relevant standards or frameworks can be found in Appendix 1.

An excellent example of operational use of OGC SWE standards is the Debris Flow Monitoring System deployed in Chinese Taipei. This program uses OGC Web Services and OGC SensorThings standards integrated into a monitoring, modelling, and alerting infrastructure. (See also: https://youtu.be/6Hb2iXQQ8TY).

Tier 4 involves the transition of current SDI into a broader Spatial Knowledge Infrastructure (SKI) that can be strategically planned based on: (1) emerging standards and technology trends that are addressing known gaps, challenges and needs (refer to Direction Setting chapter - Emerging Standards and Trends); (2) delivering geospatial information into the Web of data and bridging the SDI to a broader ecosystem of

information systems (Figure 2.2), and (3) The SDI to SKI -Maturity Matrix (Figure 2.3). A

'needs assessment and gap analysis template' described in IGIF SP6 Appendix 6.3 has identified two potential needs of an SDI at the Tier 4 level:

Standards are constantly being produced and updated based on prevailing technologies and user needs and challenges. The SDOs - ISO/TC211, OGC, IHO and W3C have online standards registries where the latest standards and information are made available and accessible ( Appendix 5). Trends are driving requirements for enhancing existing geospatial standards, rethinking and crafting a new generation of standards based on the lessons learned of the existing baseline. It is also opportune that the implementation of a new suite of standards leverages the value of the emerging ecosystem of technologies and user requirements.

The bridging of the SDI and broader ecosystem of knowledge information systems can be done at the web services/API or database level. There are existing suites of standards that could kickstart enhancement of SDIs for future SKI capabilities. For instance: OGC APIs as well as new and upcoming Tier 4 standards are included for review in Appendix 6.

It is important for implementing organizations to recognize the many interested parties that have different roles in governance. Examples of governance bodies relevant to standards for geospatial information management include:

Other bodies may also have a strong role to play:

One of the first steps in the planning process is to confirm the organizational governance roles, structures, and processes to organize and guide the implementation of the action plan. It is important to ensure that the foundation is in place to be able to set up project oversight and implementation structures (implementation and persistent governance structures and teams), assess and determine scope and resource requirements to deliver on the action plan (including post-implementation), and implement changes outlined in the action plan.

Examples of key activities include:

These ensure that international policy and standards are well understood within the country, and that the international standards bodies understand any specific issues relevant to your country.

Where bridges lead will depend on the set of standards deemed to be important. Engagement with organizations such as OGC and W3C may be direct, while engagement with ISO, IHO, or IETF may require a 'bridge' such as a national mirror committee that may be managed by a national standards body. Such committee may require a national government representative, for instance from the national standards body, to participate on behalf of all organizations in a nation.

Adoption of standards by individual organizations can be influenced through many strategies, such as:

Although it would be desirable for organizations to simply believe in and adopt standards because it is the right thing to do, this approach is generally not practical. There tends to be sufficient flexibility in relevant standards to enable fine tuning the implementation to meet the organization’s needs (e.g., profiles of the ISO 19115-1 Metadata standard are one such example). Furthermore, when the intent is to achieve interoperability through adoption of standards by cooperating organizations in a community, goodwill alone tends to be insufficient. Therefore, a mix of clear direction, coupled with strong community engagement must be incorporated into any national action plan.

The most basic requirement in an SDI is to be able to easily and effectively access, integrate, and display geospatial information that may be stored in one or more databases using different geospatial technology solutions and storage formats. Of the Tier 1 standards listed in Appendix 1 and Table 4.1, by using just _OGC WMS an organization can generate web-based applications that provide access to spatial information holdings, regardless of the formats used or GIS technology deployed. Many organizations have implemented _OGC WMS first to provide seamless access to geospatial information. These deployments provide quick, short term success and return on investment. If the data that an organization wants to display on the internet are already organized in tiles, then there is also the possibility of using OGC WMTS. As implementations mature, most organizations can enhance their SDI capability with discovery and metadata browsing capability.

The Tier 1 standards recommended for implementing powerful access, browsing, visualization and display capability are listed in Table 4.1. These standards provide the ability for the user to access and display geospatial information as images in any browser.

The ISO and OGC standards for catalogue and discovery are widely implemented in national, regional, and local SDIs. Most geospatial technology vendors and open-source solutions support these standards. Implementation of these standards, listed in Appendix 1 and table 4.1 are required to provide the ability to search metadata holdings for specific geospatial information of interest. The metadata and catalogue searches also allow the user to determine if the geospatial information is fit for a particular use or purpose.

The content of a catalogue is metadata. Metadata is a description of a resource, in this case a geospatial resource. The catalogue provides the services to search and publish the metadata for data, services, and related types of data.

The goal of information models is to allow multiple stakeholders across many jurisdictions to have an agreement on how to express data for a specific domain, such as weather, geology, or land use. Such agreements significantly enhance interoperability and the ability to share geospatial information at any time and as required. Followings are some examples of the standards that can be implemented for sharing geospatial information.

For information modelling and encoding: GML is the primary OGC/ISO standard used for modelling, encoding, and transporting geospatial information. In addition, a number of OGC standards reference and use _OGC Observations and Measurements _(O&M) (also ISO 19156 _) . While O&M is used by a number of Tier 2 recommended standards, knowledge of this standard is not required until Tier 3.

For geospatial information query and access: The following standards allow the application and user to specify geographic and attribute queries and request that the geospatial information be returned as an encoding.

Both information models and domain models are relevant to Tier 2 and Tier 3 in the evolution of an SDI. Using such domain-specific, information or content standards helps to guarantee that geospatial information can be encoded and shared with consistent semantics, geometry, quality, and provenance. Some domain models are agreed between countries, such as the INSPIRE Data Specifications, or by international organizations such as the World Meteorological Organization. Further, data models tend to be encoding tools agnostic, meaning the content can be encoded using XML, JSON, and other encoding technologies. Examples of these models include OGC CityGML 2.0, ISO 19152 Geographic Information - Land Administration Domain Model (LADM), OGC LandInfra/InfraGML, IHO S-121 Maritime Limits and Boundariet and IHO S-100 Universal Hydrographic Data Model Part 3 - General Feature Model.

Multiple organizations share foundation/framework geospatial information and services with each other and the broader community to improve knowledge and understanding, thereby contributing to evidence-based decision making, situational awareness, and improved societal outcomes.

In this Tier, the infrastructure is mature enough to support deployment of more and more applications to enhance value, provide increased citizen benefit, increase collaboration between organizations. There is also the introduction and integration of an increasing number of geospatial information resources, including volunteered and real time sensor feeds. We will also see mature deployment of mobile applications. The standards mentioned in the Tier 3 and related URLs are listed in Table 4.3.

Processing in the most general sense means - on their way from server to client tool (and then possibly onwards to client screen) data gets modified. In a simple scenario this is already done by an OGC WMS when it applies "styling" to a layer. However, processing can be highly complex, such as processing to generate long-running server-side simulations. In recent years, "analytics'' has become a common term for - loosely speaking - processing done for gaining insight. Following the Big Data principle of "process data close to the source" because data are "too big to transport", such processing tasks are preferably executed on the server that houses the data.".

The approach for this process, which almost exclusively ^[23] uses the WWW http protocol, is that a client sends a request encoded as a URL (which contains the processing task, objects addressed, result formats, and any further parameters needed).

While there is general consensus on the advantages of "shipping code to data" there are a range of options on how to do this; the alternatives below are each represented by a standard, allowing service providers to pick their favorites:

OGC and EU INSPIRE have adopted WCPS OGC 08-068r2as the analytics component of the WCS suite.

A DGGS is a spatial reference system that uses a hierarchical tessellation of cells to partition and address the globe. The OGC Discrete Global Grid Systems (DGGS) and the _ISO 19170 Geographic Information: Core Reference System and Operations are key standards for understanding and implementing DGGS. DGGS are characterized by the properties of their cell structure, geo-encoding, quantization strategy and associated mathematical functions. The OGC DGGS Abstract Specification supports the specification of standardized DGGS infrastructures that enable the integrated analysis of very large, multi-source, multi-resolution, multi-dimensional, distributed geospatial data. Interoperability between OGC DGGS implementations is anticipated through implementation standards, and extension interface encodings of OGC Web Services. This specification has particular benefit in the context of integrating geospatial and statistical Information and has been referenced in the Global Statistical Spatial Framework.

Increasingly, mobile devices are becoming a key source for geospatial data capture, maintenance, and application. These capabilities are in addition to the simple ability to display maps to a mobile device as required in Tier 1. While OGC web services standards noted above work in the mobile internet environment, we note that there are other adopted and in-work standards that may be of relevance to Tier 3:

Increasingly, geospatial information is being generated as the result of real time observations being captured by in-situ and dynamic (moving) sensor systems. These information resources provide the ability to enhance decision making, situational awareness, quality of life, sustainability, and other useful functions. Anyone with a smart phone is already using or accessing real time sensor information, such as the current temperature at a particular location.

The OGC has a suite of standards that allow applications and services to describe, task, and request observations from one or more sensors. This suite of sensor standards is called OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE). The OGC uses the following definition for a sensor:
_"An entity capable of observing a phenomenon and returning an observed value."

The type of observation procedure determines the estimated value of an observed property as its output. A web or internet accessible sensor is any sensor that has an IP address that can provide or be tasked to provide an observation. Sensors can be in a fixed position or mobile. An excellent example of an OGC SWE implementation is the US NOAA Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS). This system provides real time access to mobile and in-situ ocean observing sensor systems. These sensors are obtained from numerous different technology providers, all described, tasked, and accessed using OGC SWE standards. Other excellent examples of operational use of OGC SWE standards are:

The main SWE suite of standards are:

More and more SDIs are integrating real time sensor feeds. This real time information is used to enhance situational awareness or is fused with other geospatial information resources to enhance decision support. Another key use for real time sensor information is to feed modelling systems that are used to predict severe weather events, tsunamis, debris flows, and other potential catastrophic events that impact human lives.

A further standard to consider is the OGC SensorThings API. The _OGC SensorThings API is an OGC standard specification for providing an open and unified way to interconnect IoT devices, data, and applications over the Web. The SensorThings API is an open standard, builds on Web protocols and the OGC Sensor Web Enablement standards, and applies an easy-to-use REST-like style. The result is to provide a uniform way to expose the full potential of the Internet of Things.

Notably, there is a close connection between sensor and coverage standards as they share, among others, the identical sensor semantics description. Hence, an upstream SOS service might collect and homogenize data which subsequently get stored and served as coverages by the downstream-optimized WCS, WCPS, WMS, WPS, and all other standards supporting coverages, without any loss of semantics.

GeoSemantics means that data is explicitly defined, persistently and uniquely identified, and transferred into machine-actionable format that supports quick data interlinking, searchability, interpretation, and reuse that improves the data integration and analysis on the Web. GeoSemantics uses the web linked data pattern, and is supported by a set of standards, practices, and tools for publishing and linking structured data on the Web.

The ISO 19150 (Geographic information – Ontology) series of standards are developed to support semantic web. ISO 19150-1 defines the framework for semantic interoperability of geographic information. This framework defines a high-level model of the components required to handle semantics in the ISO geographic information standards through the use of ontologies.

The Spatial Data on the Web Interest Group(W3C/OGC) is one of the communities that is providing significant input to development of good practices and vocabularies that encourage better sharing of spatial data on the Web; and identify areas where standards should be developed jointly by both W3C, OGC and ISO, including _OGC GeoSPARQLand _ISO 19150.

As our global web of information continues to increase with both data and technology, our capacity to share geospatial data increases towards becoming a spatially enabled web of data.

For general understanding of the industry trends the reader is referred to the UN-GGIM report, " Future Trends in geospatial information management: five to ten year vision" for details on what we believe to be the technological, legal, policy, and consumer trends impacting the collection, use, and visualization of geospatial information.

To assist in understanding these trends in a geospatial standards context, the OGC has worked with its membership, alliance partners and others to develop and maintain the OGC Technology Trends. This research informs the road-mapping for standards development, thus ensuring that necessary standards are developed at pace with technology development.

These trends are driving requirements for enhancing existing geospatial standards, rethinking and crafting a new generation of standards based on the lessons learned of the existing baseline, and incorporating new suites of standards required to leverage the value of the emerging technologies and user requirements.

There could be several different views on the trends driving new areas of standards development or new applications of existing standards. One of many such views, which combine the UN-GGIM and OGC’s trends, is presented below (Figure 4.7):

The following are a few of the trends driving new areas of standards development or new applications of existing standards as they are listed in Figure 4.7. The standards mentioned in Tier 4 along with related SDOs (Standard Development Organizations) are listed in Table 4.4.

The following are examples online and freely available education and training programs. Please refer to Appendix 8 for additional details on training.

IGIF SP1, Strategic Pathway 1 - Governance and Institutions, provides guidance on strategic planning. Since standards are a fundamental aspect of achieving appropriate outcomes, it can be useful to ensure that local strategic plans incorporate standards at the earliest stages. Examples of Strategic Plans:

Examples of Strategic Plans:

The INSPIRE Directive and its implementation across Europe can be seen as a major use case for geospatial standards. Many of these standards are directly or indirectly referenced to, either in the Directive or its supporting documents and guidelines. The message is geospatial standards support legislation, which support fundamental data (such as INSPIRE data themes), and eventually support SDGs.

Current Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) enable existing and emerging industries to use real-time precise positioning data, allowing them to improve productivity, efficiency, safety and decision making. Standards play a crucial role when combining GNSS and geodetic data with data from other domains.

https://frontiersi.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/P1003-Geodetic-Standards—​Final-Report.pdf

What are the indicators for success from which tangle benefits can be assessed? Provided below are case standards implementation case studies showing ROI, cost savings, and new efficiencies benefitting one or more organizations.