ISO/TC 211 remembers 2011 & 2012

2011 saw our then chair, Mr Olaf Østensen presenting at the inaugural UN GGIM meeting. This has grown into an important forum for us to engage with both UN agencies and a wide range of UN member countries to help them implement that “standards” part of the UN Integrated Geospatial Information Framework.

We also published two more standards developed jointly with OGC: ISO 19156 Observations and measurements (now Observations, measurements and samples) and ISO 19149 Rights expression language for geographic information, and another with UN FAO: ISO 19144-2 Land Cover Meta Language which was updated in 2023 to separate out land use from land cover. This standard is valuable in FAO’s work to track some of the results of climate change, providing data to support planning and mitigation.

In 2012 we published eight standards, including ISO/TS 19158 Quality assurance of data supply which came to us through EuroGeographics and ISO 19152 Land Administration Domain Model, which is currently expanding greatly as a result of enthusiastic work across the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG); the UN Expert Group on Land Administration Management; universities in Delft, Athens, and Wuhan; OGC and an international team led by Mr Chris Body from Australia. The resulting multi-part standard will cover land registration and valuation, marine georegulation, and spatial planning.