Canadian framework data standards meet international norms, making the data compatible with both commercial and custom geospatial information applications. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the International Organization for Standardization are two groups involved in the establishment of international standards governing framework data.

Open Geospatial Consortium

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is a consortium of over 387 companies, agencies and universities working toward a world in which everyone benefits from geographic information and services made available across any network, application, or platform. The mission of the OGC is to promote the development and use of advanced open systems standards and techniques in the area of geoprocessing and related information technologies.

OGC manages a global consensus process that results in approved interface and encoding specifications that enable interoperability among and between diverse geospatial data stores, services, and applications. Its membership is international and includes universities, federal government agencies, local government agencies, earth imaging vendors, content providers, database software vendors, integrators, computing platform vendors and other technology providers. OGC facilitates their reaching agreement on OpenGIS specifications for interfaces, schemas and architectures. Systems implementing OpenGIS standards can interoperate, whether those systems are running on the same computer or the same network. OGC standards provide essential infrastructure for the Spatial Web, a network of geospatial resources that is thoroughly integrated into the Web, such as the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure.

International Organization for Standardization

The International Organization for Standardization Geographic Information/Geomatics Technical Committee 211 (ISO/TC 211) is responsible for the ISO geographic information series of standards. Many bodies are actively engaged in the work of ISO/TC 211. These include national standardization bodies, the OGC, international professional bodies such as the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) and the International Cartographic Association (ICA), UN agencies, and sectoral bodies. The CGDI interest in the work of ISO/TC 211 is represented through the membership of Natural Resources Canada.

This work aims to establish a structured set of standards for information concerning objects or phenomena that are directly or indirectly associated with a location relative to the Earth. For geographic information, these standards may specify methods, tools and services for data management (including definition and description), and for acquiring, processing, analyzing, accessing, presenting and transferring such data in digital/electronic form between different users, systems and locations.

The work links to appropriate standards for information technology and data where possible, and provides a framework for the development of sector-specific applications using geographic data. For example, a number of the OGC standards have been adopted by ISO and others are being considered for adoption.