The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has publicly released a document outlining the overall National System for Geospatial-Intelligence (NSG) standards baseline.

The baseline was developed and coordinated by the National Center for Geospatial Intelligence Standards, or NCGIS, which was formed by the NGA soon after Sept. 11 with other Defense Department agencies, intelligence agencies, standards organizations, civil agencies, private industry and foreign partners. The purpose in establishing the set of standards is to enable data and service interoperability in the context of a service-oriented architecture.

“Geospatial Intelligence Standards: Enabling a Common Vision,” issued in November but released to the public Feb. 20, endorses a set of key specifications known collectively as the Open Geospatial-Intelligence Consortium Spatial Data Infrastructure 1.0 baseline. These OGC standards include the OpenGISR Specifications for Web Feature Service (WFS), Geography Markup Language (GML), Web Map Service (WMS), Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD), Catalogue Services (CS-Web) and Filter Encoding Specifications (FE).

“The domestic civil community and the international community are implementing largely the same suite of common geospatial standards” as the national system, the document states. “This architecture is particularly valuable to the homeland security community within the NSG, allowing it to share investments in geospatial data and knowledge related to critical infrastructure and natural environments with U.S. cities, counties and other organizations to support the prevention and mitigation of national disaster and security situations.”

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