The ISO committee for geographic information standards, ISO/TC 211, is continually working to keep its standards relevant to best practice – both in the geo world, general IT, and the user domains.

At present, TC 211 has a number of short-term studies on areas such as: 

• providing machine-readable normative statements, such as requirements, recommendations and permissions, to make it easier for software developers to use those standards
• model-driven standards documentation to streamline the standardisation process and reduce errors in the published documents
• non-relational database technologies, such as semi-structured document stores, array databases, triple stores, and the like
• registers, whether to support future publication of standards “as registers” or wider use of registers for publishing additional material (data types, terms and concepts, data quality measures, classification systems and so on)
• transformation of public administration (“e-Government” or “digital government”)

Several of these TC 211 studies are in the context of overall ISO work on modernising the development and publication of standards. Furthermore, they are liable to become considerably more important in the future as we adopt FAIR principles of data sharing. Getting involved at this relatively early stage is an opportunity to shape the standards publication process, ensuring that they are easy to understand and implement in real life, across multiple domains.

You can see more about the TC 211 study groups (“Ad hoc groups”) by clicking here.

If you have specific experience of using ISO or OGC standards with non-relational technologies, or of using machine-readable standards, or an interest in contributing to these studies, do please contact BSI’s IST/36, which is responsible for UK input to ISO/TC 211.