Spatial Database Transfer Standards 2: Characteristics for Assessing Standards and Full Descriptions of the National and International Standards in the World

This book represents five and a half years of work by the ICA Commission on Standards for the Transfer of Spatial Data during the 1991- 95 ICA cycle. The effort began with the Commission working to develop a set of scientific characteristics by which every kind of spatial data transfer standard could be understood and assessed. This implies that every facet of the transfer process must be understood so that the scientific characteristics could be most efficiently specified. The members of the Commission spent hours looking at their own standard and many others, to ascertain how to specify most effectively the characteristic or subcharacteristic in question. The result is a set of internationally agreed scientific characteristics with 13 broad primary level classes of characteristics, 85 secondary characteristics, and about 220 tertiary characteristics that recognizes almost every possible capability that a spatial data transfer standard might have. It is recognized that no one standard..