A suite of international standards for the unambiguous transfer of geophysical data

In 2005-06, eight international standards, concerned with the representation and interchange of integrated environmental data, were published under the auspices of the of International Organization for Standardization (ISO) / International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). This suite of standards, collectively referred to as the SEDRIS family of standards, offers a comprehensive schema for expressing a wide range of data models and representations, and is supported by a strong spatial reference model (and the associated coordinate conversion and transformation facilities), a standard dictionary of terms and environmental concepts, and a transmittal format for the platform-independent exchange of data sets. These standards provide an integrated framework for the unambiguous representation of environmental data and for the efficient transfer of data sets between systems by reducing the number of disparate formats required when multiple systems are involved. The ISO/IEC 18023-2 – Abstract Transmittal format, and the associated ISO/IEC 18023-3 – SEDRIS Transmittal Format (STF) binary encoding, allow complex environmental data sets to be represented and transferred using a common transmittal format. The content of such transmittals adheres to the constructs, syntax, and data organization semantics specified in ISO/IEC 18023-1, which provides a rich data representation model for expressing environmental data sets. The ISO/IEC 18023 in turn depends on two other standards: ISO/IEC 18025 – Environmental Data Coding Specification (EDCS), which provides dictionaries of environmental concepts and terms; and ISO/IEC 18026 – Spatial Reference Model, which provides a comprehensive set of spatial reference frames, projections, and transformations. All three standards are extensible through registration. An implementation of these standards, made available as software development kits, allows developers to focus on building their applications while remaining conformant to the standards. In addition, an array of tools and utilities, ranging from conversion software to visualization or inspection tools to compliance checking of data transmittals, is also made available to both developers and data users. This paper provides a description and overview of the SEDRIS family of standards, and in particular gives an example of how these standards can be used in the representation and exchange of meteorological, oceanographic, and other data sets.