As of June 2009 departments of the Canadian federal government are expected to comply with the Treasury Board Standard on Geospatial Data for sharing spatial data within the federal government. Departments will have until May 2014 to fully implement this standard. The objective of the standard is to enable departments to “share geospatial data efficiently and effectively to support program and service delivery.” The Standard on Geospatial Data adopts measures that are part of the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI). The specific standards mandated are ISO19115, which corresponds to the US Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) metadata standard, and ISO 19128, which corresponds to the Open Geospatial Consortium’s (OGC) Web Mapping Service (WMS). The guidelines for who needs to implement the ISO 19128 standard are that any federal department “deploying a WMS to present geospatial data as a pictorial view on the Web” must implement an ISO 19128-compliant WMS, but departments that produce geospatial data “with no intent to make it accessible through WMS” don’t need to conform to ISO 19128. To me the standard is about what is required to share metadata, data about spatial data, and pictorial representations of spatial data, but not about sharing the raw spatial data. Thanks to Janet Fraser for pointing me to this.
I blogged about public access to government geospatial data in Canada previously.
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