ISO/TC 211 remembers 2019-2021

2019 saw our most prolific year until then, with eleven documents published: one new standard, one new technical report, one amendment and eight new editions. This was exceeded in 2023 when ISO published twelve new or revised documents developed within our committee.

2019 was also the year that my predecessor Agneta Engberg became chair of ISO/TC 211. Working with Mats she steered ISO/TC 211 through the challenges of COVID, in particular organising four large ‘virtual only’ plenaries. My memory of the earlier parts of the worldwide pandemic response was the sense of community: all meetings started with simply sharing from around the world how our communities were doing – first hand experience of the pandemic response from colleagues across north America, Europe, east Asia and Australasia.

2019 was also the year when we placed our ‘good practices’ on our public website to help new and long standing delegates and users of our standards understand how we work and how to engage.

In 2021, working with OGC, we moved the UNGGIM Standards Guide (ogc.org) online. 2021 also saw the first publication from our joint work with ISO/TC 204 Intelligent Transport Systems: ISO/TR 19169:2021 Geographic Information — Gap-analysis: mapping and describing the differences between the current GDF and ISO/TC 211 conceptual models.