Registration of Geospatial Information Elements

Geospatial information elements are the fundamental constituents of geographic information. A dataset of geospatial information includes the geographic features, their attributes, and the relationships between these features together with the associated metadata and spatial elements. Most of the suite of geospatial standards define templates for describing these features, attributes, relations, and metadata. The actual feature, attribute, and metadata information element definitions are application dependent; for example, a road may be described differently in a transportation logistic map than in a cadastral map, and more detailed attributes about trees may exist in a forestry land cover map than in a political jurisdiction map. Registers may be used to hold these definitions so that they may be used in common in similar applications. In fact the largest part of the standardization of geographic information, with respect to the management of detail, is the standardization of feature and attribute dictionaries and common code lists that may be used to support attributes and metadata. This chapter describes how ISO standard 19135 provides for management of registers of geographic information elements, including the complex relationships between multiple registers. Registers allow for the management of diversity.