Technical guidelines

ISO standards

Standardization organizations at the global, European and national level responsible for the creation and publication of norms and standards, including geo-information ones:

As part of the above-mentioned units, technical committees dedicated to geoinformation have been established:

The aforementioned organizations have developed and published a total of several dozen norms and standards in the field of broadly understood geoinformation.

From the point of view of SDI implementation, the standards of the 19100 series are of key importance, including the most important of them:

  • PN-EN ISO 19107:2010 – Polish version – Geographic information – Spatial schema,
  • PN-EN ISO 19108:2010 – Polish version – Geographic information – Temporal schema,
  • PN-EN ISO 19109:2009 – Polish version – Geographic information – Rules for application schemes,
  • PN-EN ISO 19111:2010 – Polish version – Geographic information – Spatial references by coordinates,
  • PN-EN ISO 19115:2010 – Polish version – Geographic information – Metadata,
  • PN-EN ISO 19118:2011 – English version – Geographic information – Encoding,
  • PN-EN ISO 19119:2010 – Polish version – Geographic information – Services,
  • PN-EN ISO 19128:2010 – Polish version – Geographic information – Web Map Server Interface (WMS)
  • PN-EN ISO 19136:2009 – English version – Geographic information – geographic markup language (GML),
  • PN-EN ISO 19156:2013-11 – English version – Geographic information – observations and measurements,
  • PN-EN ISO 19157:2014-04 – English version – Geographic information – Data quality,
  • ISO/TS 19139:2007 Geographic information – Metadata – XML schema implementation,
  • PN-EN ISO 19142:2011 – English version – Geographic information – Web feature service (WFS).

OGC standards

In addition to standardization organizations, a fundamental role in creating geoinformation standards is played by non-profit organizations associating experts, research centers, institutions including government agencies and enterprises related to the creation of GIS solutions.

The main supplier of technical standards at the level of implementation specifications is:

The main goal of the consortium is to develop, publish and implement open standards for spatial data and services. Some of these standards become the basis of ISO standards.

From the point of view of the Spatial Data Infrastructure, the following standards are of key importance:

W3C Standards

The essence of the implementation of the Spatial Data Infrastructure is free access to spatial data resources along with metadata in the environment of computer networks.

This approach determines the use of commonly used database, server and WWW technologies in systems and application solutions.

The technologies used include:

  • server-client communication protocols and methods, including GET, POST, http. etc.,
  • communication and data exchange languages, including XML,
  • data presentation technologies in the web environment – e.g. HTML etc.

As in the case of geoinformation, the implementation of solutions based on the above-mentioned technologies must take into account existing technical standards.

The organization that sets, creates and publishes the main standards in this area (communication in the WWW environment) is:

The basic standards used in the construction of SDI include:

  • HTML & CSS
  • Protocols
  • XML Technology