1.2 International standards

From Geostandards

Contents 1 Cooperation OGC and ISO/TC 211 2 W3C 3 OMG 4 OASIS 5 Presentation

Cooperation OGC and ISO/TC 211

This section offers insight into the organisations which are responsible for the normalisation, standardisation and specification of geo-information at an international level. The work that these standardisation organisations do forms the basis of the Dutch framework of geostandards.

Worldwide, there are two standardisation organisations for geostandards:

• ISO/TC 211;

• The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).

These organisations were founded more or less at the same time, but they each have their own history: ISO/TC 211 focuses on the formal normalisation point of view and OGC mainly looks at it from the supplier’s side. At first they did not really cooperate. Nowadays their cooperation is just fine, because of a clear division of roles: OGC writes the specifications which are thoroughly tested in the so called OWS test beds for example: OWS-5. When these specifications are sufficiently mature, OGC transfers them to ISO /TC 211 to make them into formal standards.

This cooperative relationship has been set out in agreement between the OGC and ISO TC/211. The main points of this agreement are:

• The OGC wishes to obtain ISO International Standard status for its Industry Implementation Specifications.

• ISO/TC 211 wishes to adopt appropriate Industry Implementation Specifications as ISO International Standards or other ISO deliverables.

• The OGC wishes, while retaining its market responsiveness, to align with ISO/TC 211 on working practices.

• ISO/TC 211 wishes, within the constraints of the ISO Directives, to co-operate with the OGC in assisting the alignment of life cycle working practices.

• The OGC and ISO/TC 211 wish to harmonize and agree their respective work programmes and to set up a group to handle issues under this agreement.

• The OGC and ISO/TC 211 wish to achieve mutual benefit from sharing the expertise of the domain experts of the two organisations and they welcome cross-project participation.

At the meetings of the Joint Advisory Group (JAG) and those of the OGC and ISO/TC 211, matters are concretely discussed in action projects.

W3C

The WC3 World Wide Web Consortium focuses on the development of what they call ‘interoperable technologies’ to lead the Web to its full potential. W3C manages, amongst other things, the commonly used standards - http, HTML and XML. ISO/TC 211 and OGC have chosen http and XML as their point of departure for geostandards.

A more recent language, that is important to the interoperability of data, is called Web Ontology Language (OWL). This language makes it possible to define ontology in a structured way. OWL is an increase of the Resource Description Framework (RDF).

The OGC and W3C have something in common.

OMG

The OMG Object Management Group is a cooperative and its goal is to develop standards which could improve the integration of various kinds of software within organisations. An important product of OMG is the Unified Modelling Language (UML). UML is often used when data models are drawn up. This language was developed as a standard way of describing the models of a system. UML makes it possible to describe a system by using a number of diagrams. In version 2.0 of the UML, Object Constraint Language (OCL) has been included. With the help of OCL, extra rules and conditions can be drawn up that are valid to the objects that have been modelled in a UML model. In this way, a system can be described in much better detail than would have been possible using only UML.

UML is an important assistive tool to the Model Driven Approach (MDA): a method for software design, developed by OMG. <Ryb mag het ook By using MDA, software is developed worden>; the points of departure are the functional models which are created, independent of the technique which the system is finally realized with. Separating technical aspects has to lead to a design that is not influenced by the state and development of the technology.

ISO/TC 211 and OGC both model their standards and specifications in UML classediagrams conform to the OMG method. OGC and OMG have something in common.

OASIS

OASIS stands for the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards. OASIS stimulates the development cohesion and the use of standards for electronic business, mainly by implementing the general standards of, for example, W3C in new standards. In this context, Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) was developed; of which XML is a simplified and more user friendly realisation. The important standard of OASIS is, amongst other things, the ebXML family. These standards are more frequently used within geostandards, to store registers and services (see Chapter 5 of the Framework of Geostandards).

Presentation

This Dutch presentation gives an insight into the relationships between the various standardisations.

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