A standard dictionary for environmental terminology

Under the auspices of the of International Organization for Standardization (ISO) / International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), eight ISO/IEC standards, concerned with the representation and interchange of integrated environmental data, were published in 2005-06. This suite of standards, collectively known as the SEDRIS family of standards, provides a comprehensive data representation schema, a spatial reference model for the expression of positions and coordinates, a standard dictionary of terms, and a corresponding transmittal format for the exchange of data sets. One of these standards is the ISO/IEC 18025 Environmental Data Coding Specification (EDCS). A critical problem in the representation of information, or the automatic exchange and processing of data sets, is the lack of standard naming conventions for terms and concepts found in the data sets. To facilitate the common understanding, and the automated processing, of environmental data, the SEDRIS family of standards was developed with the constraint that user-defined terms or constructs would be provided through a standard mechanism. The EDCS provides a standard dictionary of environmental terms and concepts, to which new concepts can be added, and the standard can be extended, through registration. The EDCS is a collection of nine inter-related dictionaries that support the semantics of environmental objects and their associated characteristics, and can be used by different applications supporting different aspects of the environment (including terrain, weather, ocean, space, urban, and sensor related information). The EDCS provides a registration process where users can submit new environmental concepts and terms to be included in the EDCS. More than eleven thousand entries exist in the EDCS standard, and since 2005 more than 1400 entries have been proposed for registration. All concept entries in EDCS are required to have a unique label, a unique numerical identifier, and a complete definition, and in most cases the definitions are supplemented by one or more references. This paper will describe the EDCS and in particular how it can and has been used in support of meteorological, oceanographic, and other data sets.