National Spatial Data Infrastructure Partnership Programs: Rethinking the Focus (2001)
Chapter: Data Standards
In addition to the efforts of the inter-agency FGDC, many individual agencies have made concerted efforts to address the need for geospatial data integration. For instance, in 1999 the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) established the position of Geographic Information Officer, with a mandate to coordinate geospatial data production, maintenance, and integration across the agency, and to build a more integrated interface between the agency and the users of its services.
COMPONENTS OF THE NSDI
The NSDI has been implemented by defining and promoting data and metadata standards, and by establishing a distributed geospatial data ‘clearinghouse,’ within the context of an overarching data Framework:
Data Standards
Two major standards have been developed over the past decade as components of the NSDI. The Spatial Data Transfer Standard (SDTS) defines terminology and content for geographic datasets. It has been mandated as Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 173 (NIST, 1994), and several federal agencies have developed customized versions of the SDTS to meet their specific needs. While this standard has been mandated for federal activities, its use outside the federal government is essentially voluntary. In the private sector, it competes with a range of standards and formats, many of many of which are associated with specific commercial software products. Moreover, the SDTS competes with other standards in use by the military. In practice, therefore, the general community’s adoption of format standards is driven at least in part by the popularity of software products, and time-consuming and expensive conversion between different formats is still common. Although vendor-specific formats may be more popular than SDTS in practice, it must be acknowledged that the effort to develop SDTS provided an opportunity for the community to openly discuss and develop some consensus about the need and mechanism for sharing
