These standards play an important role in enabling interoperability as part of the Geospatial Platform for GeoOneStop, place-based initiatives, and other potential future programs of the FGDC.
The Steering Committee endorsed standards (http://www.fgdc.gov/standards/fgdc-endorsed-external-standards/index_html) from the OGC, ISO TC211 and ANSI (INCITS L1) standards development organizations.
“OGC’s interface and encoding standards are an essential part of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure. They play a key role in providing technical interoperability among geospatial systems used at all levels of government,” said Ivan DeLoatch, Executive Director of the FGDC. “We encourage government agencies to include these standards, as well as FGDC’s data standards, in the language of software and data procurement documents.”
The FGDC Standards Working Group will revisit the list every year as part of its standards life-cycle management activities.
The Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) is an interagency committee that promotes the coordinated development, use, sharing, and dissemination of geospatial data on a national basis. This nationwide data publishing effort is known as the National Spatial Data Infrastructure [http://www.fgdc.gov/nsdi/nsdi.html] (NSDI). The NSDI is a physical, organizational, and virtual network designed to enable the development and sharing of this nation’s digital geographic information resources. FGDC activities are administered through the FGDC Secretariat, hosted by the U.S. Geological Survey.
The OGC is an international consortium of more than 395 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.