1.1 What are geo-standards?

In English, the word standard is written with a capital S when the standard has been published by an official institution. When the word standard is used without a capital S, it is a de-facto standard.

Standards are the machinery that put the services in motion (on the Internet as well) and keep them going. What the machinery does is often not visible to the user. It operates in silence, in the background, but without this machinery not much will ever happen.

Standards make it is possible to offer information in the correct way, to integrally present it in reciprocally cohesive way and to share it. The request for, and the offer of, electronic information can be optimally fine-tuned, thanks to standards.

Standards also make it possible to find information. Using standards, professionals, entrepreneurs and ordinary people are able to find the information that they are looking for in the Internet information jungle both quickly and easily. Moreover, standards make it possible to exchange the information collected regardless of the software platform used. In practice, standards are applied to provisions such as search engines and web services.

Geostandards are those particular standards which are applied to geo-information. With geostandards, geo-information can be exchanged and shared. This training focuses on geostandards. You will find a short introduction to geo-information below.

Definition of geo-information

‘Geo-information, (geographic information) is data with a direct or indirect reference to a place on the earth.’ This definition is a direct quote from ISO 19101 (‘Information concerning phenomena implicitly or explicitly associated with a location relative to the Earth’). In view of the most recent developments such as Google Moon, we should now ask ourselves whether or not this definition is still up-to-date.

Examples of geo-information

There is a large variety of Geo-information. This is illustrated in these six images. The series Britain from above has focused a lot of attention on geo-information. The clips from this series give one a magnificent insight into what geo-information is.

A range of different organisations collect geo-information and manage and exchange it with other organisations. Geo-information which is exchanged is rather diverse: from information about areas which focus on water management, to information about allotments and buildings. Geo-information is used by authorities, businesses and ordinary people in their various roles. Businesses, for example, use geo-information in their own settlement policy, but also make new products and services, based on existing geo-information, and transform these into a new commercial activity.

Geo-information is expressed in vectors and grids. For example, vectors are used in statutory key geo-registers or cadastral survey maps and grids are data shown images, and air views (remote sensing) and sensor data.