ISO/TC 211 remembers 2022 - 2024

This is the last in our series recalling the 30-years of our existence, ahead of our birthday celebrations next month in Sydney. We will hear from one of the people who has been there throughout: congratulations to Mr Jan Hjelmager of Denmark: present in that first meeting in Oslo and November 1994 and (God willing) in our 30th anniversary meeting in Sydney in November 2024. Of course, Jan has contributed a lot in between, even on the occasions when he hasn’t actually travelled to the meetings.

These three years are also the three years that I have been chair. I hope to be able to introduce my successor during the Sydney meeting and I look forward to working with her to hand over the role, in the same way that I benefited from working with my predecessor, Agneta Engberg for some months in 2021-22. On a personal note, I have enjoyed the opportunity to oversee and represent the happy band of international experts who make up ISO/TC 211. I continue to find it a very amenable group made up of people dedicated to working for the common good of enabling better management of geographic information. That’s not something I can say about every group I’ve been part of!

Over these three years we have established a fruitful pattern of hybrid meetings with most groups also having virtual meetings throughout the year and an increased use of online tools for “asynchronous meetings” where a team just gets on with work using web apps like the new ISO Online Standards Development tool – so much better than emailing Word documents around!

We have worked even more closely with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and various teams under the UN Group of Experts on Geographic Information Management (UN GGIM). I think that over the three years we have published 16 consensus documents; only two covered new subject areas: ISO 19164 Indoor Feature Model and ISO/TR 19124-1 Calibration and validation of remote sensing data and derived products. The rest were revisions, amendments and additional parts – all necessary to keep up with changes in technology.

I will be finishing my three-year term as chair, but I look forward to remaining involved with ISO/TC 211 in various ways that are being worked out as I write.

Peter Parslow