ISO/TC 211 remembers 2003
In 2003 we published the first editions of several of our most influential standards: March: ISO 19111 Referencing by coordinates, revised many times, most recently in 2019 & out for vote to revise again. This explains how a set of numbers (usually two or three!) can relate to a place on the earth. It’s been revised to cope with improved technologies, tectonic plate movement, crustal deformation, and emerging use on other planets.
	May: ISO 19107 Spatial Schema, revised 2019. Implementing a subset of this is why basic geometric objects (curves, polygons etc) “just work” between systems May: ISO 19115 Metadata, now a 3-part standard with Part 4 in progress (JSON encoding). It remains our best seller, often putting the cataloguing of geographic information way ahead of the “findability” of other data, and providing an entry point to our family of standards. October: ISO 19112 Spatial referencing by identifiers, revised 2019 September: ISO 19114 Quality evaluation procedures, now absorbed into ISO 19157 Data quality

Published 2024-07-31 - Read more News

ISO/TC 211 remembers 2001 & 2002

We continued our geographic spread of meetings: Cape Town (South Africa), Reston (USA), Lisbon (Portugal), Adelaide (Australia)

Two new advisory groups: Outreach, and Harmonized Model Maintenance Group.
Consistency between our standards has always been an important aim.

Published:

• ISO/TR 19120 Functional standards, which we withdrew in 2019.
        Something we’ve only done four times (apart from when the contents was merged
        into another standard).
• ISO 19101 Reference model, a basic platform for most of the committee’s work.
       Placing it in the context of the then commonly used Reference Model for Open
       Distributed Processing. This was extended with a Part 2 for Imagery in 2008 and is
       now ISO 19101-1:2014 and -2:2018. We recognise the need to update it;
       we need a volunteer to lead the work!
• ISO 19108 Temporal schema, a rare foray into a neighbouring subject.
        We don’t recommend this now that there are other established ISO standards for 
        representing time, for example ISO 8601 Date and time format
• ISO 19113 Quality principles, now absorbed into our very successful ISO 19157
        Data quality, that had a new edition published in 2023 and will feature a quality
        measure register (part 3) soon.

ISO/TC 211 remembers 2000

We signed a co-operative agreement with DGIWG, the Defence Geospatial Information Working Group, who remain a valuable user & contributing partner

We held a workshop on registering geodetic parameters, the start of the ISO Geodetic Register now recognised as part of the UN’s Global Geodetic Reference Frame

We published our first two formal documents:

• ISO/TR 19121:2000 Geographic information — Imagery and gridded data, in October.
        This formed the basis of WG6’s work and is now being revised.
• ISO 19105:2000 Geographic information — Conformance and testing, in November.
        Our first ‘full standard’.

ISO 19105 has influenced the structure of all TC 211 standards since as well as OGC specifications – grouping requirements into classes and requiring an Abstract Test Suite. It has made a great contribution to making our standards almost “SMART ready”. We published a revised edition in 2022.