standards are needed as GIS users attempt to integrate operations with other hardware, GISs and data sources

challenge is to get industry, government and users to implement and promote use of standards many standards are set simply through common use, major attempts to develop national and international standards

portability of applications
data networks common environments cost of program development

STANDARDS ORGANIZATIONS

American National Standards Institute

Digital Cartographic Data Standards Task Force

Federal Coordinating Committee on Digital Cartography Standards Working Group Institute of Electrical Electronics Engineers International Standards Organization

Open Software Foundation

Getting the Map into the Computer Objectives Maps and their attributes find their way into GIS from existing data sources, from converting paper maps or images into digits, and from field measurement. How data capture takes place has a major impact on data structure, and therefore use of the data in the GIS

TYPES OF STANDARDS

networking standards critical to allow communications between remote computers database query standards SQL is emerging as the standard

data exchange standards governments/private companies recognize need to exchange data between different agencies/groups

several common data exchange formats currently in use:

DATA EXCHANGE FORMATS

DEM Digital Elevation Models

allows a single attribute per cell

DATA EXCHANGE FORMATS

DLG Digital Line Graph

most widely used format for exchange of digital cartographic data in vector format
used primarily for coordinate information, though it does support alphanumeric attributes
DLG Roads

DATA EXCHANGE FORMATS

Independent Map Encoding

allows both coordinate and attribute GBF/DIME Geographic Base File/Dual data

DATA EXCHANGE FORMATS

IntegraTIGER Topologically ted Geographic Encoding and Referencing

support

pre-census geographic and cartographic functions in preparation for the 1990 Census assist in the analysis of the data as well as to produce new cartographic products

to

DATA EXCHANGE FORMATS

SIF Standard Interchange Format (Intergraph)

popular data exchange format for many GIS packages

DXF Digital eXchange Format

popular exchange format for many GIS packages to transfer with CAD specially formatted text file that can be viewed and modified with any text editor organized intdifferent sections header, tableo, block, etc.

IMPLEMENTING STANDARDS

Start-up Costs

implementation of standard can incur substantial costs (money and time)

major short-term costs related to user training and reprogramming software

Management Support

needs to recognize the positive impacts of standards on productivity and system costs (plus commitment of short-term costs)

IMPLEMENTING STANDARDS

Technical Tradeoffs

tradeoffs between functionality and performance standards provide for broad functionality

adopting standard operating system provides access to large library of existing applications

standards do not allow fine tuning to specific hardware

some de facto standards are neither efficient nor the best available

IMPLEMENTING STANDARDS

Potential for Security Risks

wide availability of common operating systems allow for misuse and exploitation

spread of computer viruses depends on common operating systems

Innovation

broadly accepted standards make it very difficult to introduce innovations

STANDARDS

majority of standards effort in GIS to date has concerned data formats

missing standard of data models that would provide standard ways of representing geographic phenomena

should there be standard resolutions for DEM? should there be standards of vertical accuracy?

missing standards of data accuracy for GIS

map accuracy standards deal only with cartographic features

STANDARDS

data may be written into standard format for transfer, but it may still be virtually meaningless without extensive documentation

standards would provide GIS user with expectations about the reliability of the database as a window on the world

rather than on source documents, on transferred databases

Maria Jorelyn T. Laguilles BSOA-4B