ISO Adopts Foundation Standards for Multi-Dimensional FAIR Data

ISO has published two fundamental standards for multi-dimensional Big Earth Data, in particular: spatio-temporal datacubes, which significantly advances FAIR data principles.

In standardization, a coverage is the common unifying abstraction for regular and irregular grids (e.g., datacubes), point clouds, and general meshes. Generally, it describes spatio-temporally extended phenomena, similar to "fields" in physics, and effectively bridges raster and vector data types. 

Two new coverage standards have now been adopted by ISO. 19123-1 "Geographic information — Schema for coverage geometry and functions — Part 1: Fundamentals" describes the concepts and terminology of coverage data. 

ISO 19123-3  "Geographic information — Schema for coverage geometry and functions — Part 3: Processing fundamentals" does the same for processing through a datacube language allowing simple as well as unlimited complexity, including fusion for insightful data exploration.

Together, these standards establish a critically important basis for interoperability. As a consequence, geographic information becomes more findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable – in short: FAIR. 

The team’s task was to modernize ISO 19123 published in 2005. Together with the existing 19123-2 standard for coverage encoding, a modern suite of standards exists now for multi-dimensional data.

These collaborative efforts between ISO TC/211, OGC, the IEEE GRSS Earth Science Informatics TC, and international standards developers provide a solid foundation for FAIR data practices in geographic information.