BTS Home > Programs > Geographic Information Services > Geospatial One-Stop

What is a Standard?

The International Organization for Standards (ISO) defines a standard as: "a documented agreement containing technical specifications or other precise criteria to be used consistently as rules, guidelines, or definitions of characteristics to ensure that materials, products, processes or services are fit for their purposes."

The framework standards for Geospatial One Stop represent the rules and definitions that identify essential spatial information for each National Spatial Data Infrastructure theme, as well as provide a common schema for data exchange. The benefit is that the users can build applications to translate between the common schema and the users own format.

Specific to Transportation, BTS is working with representatives from Federal, state and local governments, academia, and private enterprise to identify the essential geospatial information differentiating one transportation spatial feature from another. The ability to identify and differentiate spatial features that are downloadable in a consistent and common format is essential to the implementation of the data exchange component of Geospatial One Stop.

The Geospatial One Stop standard documents consist of two parts, text and Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams. The text not only describes the UML in more detail but it also identifies agreed upon terminology, definitions, and other informative details that will be helpful in the use of the standard. The UML is a representation of features, along with their behaviors and properties, in the standard illustrating their relationships to each other.