How old are the TC/211 standards? How do they relate to other internationally acknowledged standards and to OGC?
Many countries identify ISO standards, by regulation and/or legislation, as the "norms" to follow. The official name is International Organization for Standardization and its acronym should be (IOS), but, because this organisation truly believes in the equality of nations, one country - one vote, this is reflected in their use of the acronym (ISO), denoting "equality". For some, ISO translates to International Standardization Organization - not true at all!

ISO/TC 211 and the Open GIS Consortium (OGC) were both established in 1994. ISO/TC 211 develops geographic data standards and the OGC develops interface specifications for geospatial software.

The OGC, as a Class A Liaison member of ISO/TC 211, has submitted specifications such as the Web Mapping Server and the Geography Markup Language (GML) for ISO/TC 211 standardization. The OGC has adopted the ISO/TC 211 Metadata Standard and other standards.

For several years there has been a joint technical committee of experts that are concurrent members of both the ISO/TC 211 and the OGC - to advise on the coordination of standards development and to minimize overlap in the programme of work for both organisations.

ISO/TC 211 has external Class A Liaison relationships with major geographic related organisations, International Cartographic Association (ICA), and International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS). This affords such organisations full participation in the technical work of ISO/TC 211, except voting. ISO/TC 211 has internal Class A Liaison relationships with other ISO Technical Committees that have related standardization work.

In the past three years, over a dozen ISO/TC211 standards have been approved. Another dozen ISO/TC 211 standards will be approved in the next year or so. Currently, there are many ISO/TC 211 standards under development in the areas of imagery and location-based services.

The year 2004, represents a milestone year in the implementation of ISO/TC 211 standards and OGC specifications across Europe. CEN/TC 287 Geographic Information was recently reactivated to adopt and profile ISO/TC 211 standards and implement OGC specifications. INSPIRE, the European Union initiative to build the European Spatial Data Infrastructure, has endorsed the adoption of both ISO/TC 211 standards and OGC specifications. CEN standards are mandatory for European countries and take precedence over national standards. The global success and acceptance of ISO standards and OGC specifications will be based, in no small part, on how well they are implemented across Europe - the first major and coordinated initiative to implement such standards and specifications.

How often does ISO require re-evaluation and re-writing, especially in the face of so many different reference standards?
ISO standards are the international "standard" for credibility and acceptance. ISO standards have a normal revision cycle every 5 years, however, this can be done at any time. The reference or "base" standard, depending on how comprehensive and flexible it is, it allows for the development of profiles, "subsets". Most base standards are too large, comprehensive and complex to be implemented. Generally, it is the "profiles" which are implemented.

When there are several profiles of the same base standard, there may be a requirement for the establishment of a registry. This registry serves as a crosswalk between the various profiles and also allows for the timely revision and replacement of profiles. Profiles also provide a mechanism to interact with ISO base standards without having to be officially approved by ISO and can be totally under the control of the organisation developing this profile. Because of this, a registry can be "official" or just a functional mechanism to translate between other profiles of the same base standard.

What level of detail do these datasets contain? Is there a commonly accepted standard (such as the WGS-84) that makes the data compatile to any geospatial management software?
The spatial resolution is 1 kilometre or 1:1 million. There are 8 layers, 4 vector and 4 raster. The vector layers are transportation, boundaries, drainage and population centres. The raster layers are elevation, vegetation, land cover and land use. Recently Global Map decided to allow and encourage any nation which wishes to submit information at 1: 250,000. This was in recognition of the fact that many small nations find the scale of 1: 1 million too small. Global Map has its own set of standards to which all participating nations adhere. We have recently established a working group to revise and expand these specifications to allow a greater degree of interoperability. The objective is to make the data compatible with as many management software systems as possible.

What areas do the TC/211 standards cover? Is there an overlap or conflict between these and analogous standards?
In general, ISO/TC 211 standards are for geographic data. The scope of ISO/TC211 is mandated as: Standardization in the field of digital geographic information. This aims to establish a structured set of standards for information concerning objects or phenomena that are directly or indirectly associated with a location relative to the Earth. These standards may specify, for geographic information, methods, tools and services for data management (including definition and description), acquiring, processing, analyzing, accessing, presenting and transferring such data in digital/electronic form between different users, systems and locations. The work shall link to appropriate standards for information technology and data where possible, and provide a framework for the development of sector-specific applications using geographic data.

Unlike other preceding technical committees - which usually develop one standard at a time, ISO/TC 211 has the unique distinction of developing, at the outset, an integrated set of more than 20 standards. Technically, this accounts for some of the slow, but careful development of ISO/TC 211 standards as well as the long process that characterizes open and consensus approvals reached at the national and international letter ballots associated with ISO technical committees.

How does the TC/211 relate to the other ISO standards such as the ISO 2709, ISO 10160-10161, and ISO 10646?
As far as I know, ISO/TC 211 does not relate directly to ISO 2709, ISO 10160 or ISO 10161. ISO/TC 211 does have an internal Class A Liaison with ISO/TC 46/WG2 Coding of country names and related entities. ISO/TC 46 is involved in standardization of practices relating to libraries, documentation and information centres, indexing and abstracting services, archives, information science and publishing and is responsible for developing ISO2709, ISO 10160, and ISO 10161.

"In 1991, the ISO Working Group responsible for ISO/IEC 10646 (JTC 1/SC 2/WG 2) and the Unicode Consortium decided to create one universal standard for coding multilingual text. Since then, the ISO 10646 Working Group (SC 2/WG 2) and the Unicode Consortium have worked together very closely to extend the standard and to keep their respective versions synchronized. Although the character codes and encoding forms are synchronized between Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646, the Unicode Standard imposes additional constraints on implementations to ensure that they treat characters uniformly across platforms and applications. To this end, it supplies an extensive set of functional character specifications, character data, algorithms and substantial background material that is not in ISO/IEC 10646.”http://www.unicode.org/faq/unicode_iso.html

The ISO 19115 Geographic information - Metadata standard cites a normative reference to ISO/IEC 10646-1, Information technology - Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (UCS) -Part 1: Architecture and Basic Multilingual Plane. ISO/TC 211 also has an internal Class A Liaison with ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2 Coded character sets - the SC that developed ISO/IEC 10646.

For agencies deploying a geospatial information infrastructure today, what would be the chances that it adopts the TC/211 over analogous standards?
ISO/TC 211 standards have a very high probability of being adopted and implemented by organisations deploying geospatial information infrastructures - because ISO/TC 211 is comprised of 30 participating nations and 26 observing nations and the national body delegations to ISO/TC 211 consists of representative and technical experts from the national mapping organisation of the country - which is usually the organisation leading the development of the Geospatial Information Infrastructure nationally and also positively affecting the evolution of any type of National Spatial Data Infrastructure.

ISO is a federation of the national standards organisation for 147 countries - which would sanction the adoption of such standards for use by their national mapping organisations. As these ISO/TC 211 standards become institutionalized in organisations such as the United Nations, and Geospatial Information Infrastructures at the national, regional, global levels, the usage of such standards will become ubiquitous and shall spread on it own to the users and providers.

International Organization for Standardization (ISO)

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