GIS STANDARDS
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Transcript GIS STANDARDS
GIS STANDARDS
Introduction
Reasons for standards
Organizations
Types of standards
Implementing standards
INTRODUCTION
standards are needed as GIS users attempt to
integrate operations with other hardware, GISs
and data sources
challenge is to get industry, government and
users to implement and promote use of
standards
many standards are set simply through common
use, major attempts to develop national and
international standards
REASONS FOR STANDARDS
portability of applications
data networks
common environments
cost of program development
STANDARDS ORGANIZATIONS
American National Standards Institute
Digital Cartographic Data Standards Task Force
Federal Coordinating Committee on Digital
Cartography – Standards Working Group
Institute of Electrical Electronics Engineers
International Standards Organization
Open Software Foundation
X-Open
TYPES OF STANDARDS
networking standards – critical to allow
communications between remote computers
database query standards – SQL is emerging as the
standard
data exchange standards – governments/private
companies recognize need to exchange data
between different agencies/groups
several common data exchange formats currently in
use:
DATA EXCHANGE FORMATS
DEM – Digital Elevation Models
allows a single attribute per cell
DATA EXCHANGE FORMATS
DLG – Digital Line Graph
most widely used format for
exchange of digital
cartographic data in vector
format
used primarily for coordinate
information, though it does
support alphanumeric
attributes
DLG Roads
DATA EXCHANGE FORMATS
GBF/DIME – Geographic Base File/Dual
Independent Map Encoding
allows both coordinate and attribute data
DATA EXCHANGE FORMATS
TIGER – Topologically Integrated Geographic
Encoding and Referencing
support
pre-census
geographic and
cartographic
functions in
preparation for the
1990 Census
to
assist in the
analysis of the data
as well as to
produce new
cartographic
DATA EXCHANGE FORMATS
SIF – Standard Interchange Format (Intergraph)
popular data exchange format for many GIS packages
DXF – Digital eXchange Format
popular exchange format for many GIS packages to
transfer with CAD
specially formatted text file that can be viewed and
modified with any text editor
organized into different sections – header, table, block,
etc.
IMPLEMENTING STANDARDS
Start-up Costs
implementation of standard can incur substantial costs
(money and time)
major short-term costs related to user training and
reprogramming software
Management Support
needs to recognize the positive impacts of standards
on productivity and system costs (plus commitment of
short-term costs)
IMPLEMENTING STANDARDS
Technical Tradeoffs
tradeoffs between functionality and performance
standards provide for broad functionality
adopting standard operating system provides access to large
library of existing applications
standards do not allow fine tuning to specific hardware
some de facto standards are neither efficient nor the
best available
IMPLEMENTING STANDARDS
Potential for Security Risks
wide availability of common operating systems allow
for misuse and exploitation
spread of computer viruses depends on common operating
systems
Innovation
broadly accepted standards make it very difficult to
introduce innovations
STANDARDS
majority of standards effort in GIS to date has
concerned data formats
missing – standard of data models that would provide
standard ways of representing geographic phenomena
should there be standard resolutions for DEM?
should there be standards of vertical accuracy?
missing – standards of data accuracy for GIS
map accuracy standards deal only with cartographic features
STANDARDS
data may be written into standard format for transfer,
but it may still be virtually meaningless without
extensive documentation
standards would provide GIS user with expectations
about the reliability of the database as a window on
the world
rather than on source documents, on transferred databases