South Africa 2001

2001 National Report for South Africa

South African National Report for 2000/1

Antony Cooper

CSIR – ICOMTEK

Pretoria, South Africa

Through the Directorate: National Spatial Information Framework (NSIF) of the Department of Land Affairs, four proposed standards have been written and submitted to the South African Bureau of Standards’ (SABS) Sub-committee for Geographic Information, SC 71E, for approval as South African standards. They are currently out for comments and voting. The four proposed standards are:

■ SABS 1876, Feature Instance Identification Standard

■ SABS 1877, Land Cover Classification Scheme for Remote Sensing Applications in South Africa

■ SABS 1878, South African Spatial Metadata Standard

■ SABS 1905, South African National Spatial Feature Catalogue

South Africa has participated actively in the development of international standards in ISO/TC 211, including attending the Plenaries and related meetings in Reston, Virginia, United States of America (September 2000) and in Lisbon, Portugal (March 2001), and the Editing Committee meeting for ISO 19123, Schema for Coverage Geometry and Functions, and the meeting of the ISO/TC 211 Advisory Group on Strategic Direction, both in Nashua, New Hampshire, United States of America in May/June 2001. At the Reston Plenary, Antony Cooper was elected Convenor of Working Group 2, Geospatial Data Models and Operators.

The NSIF Directorate has also issued a tender to develop an introductory guide to ISO/TC 211 and all the documents in the ISO 191xx suite of standards. The guide is necessary because of the number of ISO 191xx standards and the complexity of some of them, and the need to make them more accessible to the geographical informationcommunity in South Africa.

The NSIF Directorate has also set up the Spatial Data Discovery Facility, which provides an on-line catalogue of metadata on spatial data for southern Africa, that can be searched online – see http://www.nsif.org.za.

South Africa has also been active in the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) organisation, with Derek Clarke as the Chair and James Kangethe as the Secretary between the 4^th and 5^th GSDI Conferences, in Cape Town, South Africa in March 2000 and Cartagena, Columbia in May 2001, respectively.