Netherlands 2001

2001 National Report for Netherlands

 

 

Activity report standardisation in the Netherlands

Henri Aalders

Delft University

  1. Standards

In the Netherlands activities around formal standardisation are organised by the Netherlands Normalisation Institute (NEN, note the changed abbreviation!).

In the professional arena also the national council for Land Information (Ravi) brings together the practitioners and policy makers of all organisations dealing with geographic information.

Until now three official standards have been development and applied with great success; these are for:

  1. Geographic data transfer: NEN 1878;
  2. Data Definition for geographic objects: NEN 3610;
  3. The representation on geographic objects on large scale maps NEN 3256.

In the past year a system is developed for the maintenance of existing standards, enhancement of their awareness and introduction of their use. The system comprises the following activities:

  1. Communication: including setting up an information centre for users of standards and the maintenance of IMRO a standard developed with and for physical planners that is based on NEN 3610 and NEN 1878 and may become an example for several other sector standards (e.g. agriculture).

Also the scanning of developments of standards in the world that can be important for the Dutch users have resulted in a standards database, that will be published in 2001;

  1. Support: for the development of a geo data warehouse, basic applications for IMRO, third party projects, and development of tools and applications software for users. Here the development of so-called ‘authentic registrations’ will become important. These are registrations that are made available by the government having certain restrictions for the content, maintenance and use.
  2. Harmonisation: developing a standard for Traffic and Transport.
  3. Education: a system is developed for the introduction of standards in the different educational institutes. Most of the institutes do not have enough resources to support this system. It appears that only the Delft University of Technology and the Wageningen Agricultural University have course in standardisation in their regular GIS programs;

  1. OpenGIS

In the field of Open GIS applications GML become a major issue.

The Association of Geographic Information has held a GML-2.0 relay to show the potential users of its capabilities. Unfortunately of all 12 GIS manufacturers only two were able to show their possibilities and so the relay failed in principle except for one (IonicSoft, Liege Belgium), while LaserScan (Oxford, UK) showed their possibilities off-line.

The Topographic Service has initiated the development for a new system for storing topographic maps that is jointly prototyped by Wageningen University Research (user reguirements), ITC (system design) and Deft University of Technology (GML implementations.

  1. NCGI

The Netherlands Centre for Geographic Information was established in October 1997 as a private organisation, based on earlier Ravi development to provide for a spatial data and information infrastructure.

The new NCGI decentral development initiated in 1999 (i.e. metadata are stored and maintained by the provider of the data at a local server, while the central organisation will link users towards the respective metadata sets) has failed because of financial support. Now the private company Geodean has accepted to set up and maintain the system for the coming years. (Geodan was also involved in the original development of the system.

© Copyright, ICA Standards Commission, 2001