The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is an independent, non-governmental international organization with a membership of 164 national standards bodies that develop and publishes standards. The foremost aim of international standardization is to facilitate the exchange of goods and services through the elimination of technical barriers to trade. ISO/TC 211 is responsible for standardization in the field of digital geographic information. The scope of ISO/TC 211 targets several key segments for modeling and documentation of geographic information, traditionally important for significant stakeholders like the public sector; Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) with emphasis on sharing and dissemination of geographic information through services; embedding of geographic information in everyday life – ubiquitous geographic information; some specific subject domains where geographic information is an essential component and where multiple disciplines are involved.

WGIC is a global association for the geospatial industry – formally launched during the UN-GGIM 2018 summit. The overarching themes of WGIC are to build platforms for partnerships within the industry and outside with the key user industry associations. WGIC is uniquely positioned to represent and advocate collective perspectives of the geospatial industry – globally, with its growing membership base and collaborations with apex user industry associations, professional forums, multilateral organizations, and industry-academia engagements. With WGIC’s establishment as a liaison, ISO will get access to an entire ecosystem of the geospatial industry and groups of experts for various subjects and sub-sets for niche application areas of geospatial and ISO/TC 211 standards in vast contexts. 

Ms. Agneta Engberg, Chair of ISO/TC 211 congratulated WGIC board on the establishment of WGIC as a liaison and said that “the priority of ISO/TC 211 is to advance geographic information and geomatics as an enabling technology within Information and Communications Technology, by providing value, ROI, and to make systems work. The standards developed by ISO/TC 211 actively contribute to authoritative, evidence-based decisions in any field involving geographic or location content.”

Mr. Sanjay Kumar, Secretary-General and CEO of WGIC, said that “by being a liaison for ISO/ TC 211, WGIC will be able to drive dialogues on the re-defining scope of ISO/TC 211 standards in the dynamically changing technological landscapes and bring in the widespread engagement of ISO/TC 211 with WGIC’s vast membership network and alliances with the affiliate and extended user communities of the geospatial industry.” Both, ISO/TC 211 and WGIC will work towards setting up of universally applicable standards and benchmarking of various processes, reference frameworks to address standardization challenges across the geospatial or location data industry for acquisition, storage, processing and delivery of data services, equipment, hardware, software across an array of applications and platforms for the user industries. WGIC already has an association with other standard bodies such as Open Geospatial Consortium and buildingSmart International, and this association with ISO/TC 211 shall facilitate dialogues for eliminating overlaps, redundancy in standards for geomatics and location services, and work towards geospatial standards implementation at regional and global scales.