Geographic Information Standardization and Potential
Applications in Tourism
Morishige Ota
Fellow
Technology Headquarters
Kokusai Kogyo Co., Ltd.

1. Introduction
Geographic information standards are the set of standards
established for sharing geographic information, which refers to
any information regarding phenomena on the earth. ISO/TC 211
began standardization activities in 1994, and has created the ISO
19100 series of standards. The author was directly involved in thisstandardization work for ten years starting in 1995, and since thenhas been a member of the Japanese domestic committee to ISO/TC 211, and also a leader of several working groups establishedunder the domestic committee to create corresponding JISstandards. This article begins by giving an overview of geographic
information standards. It then describes knowledge systems forgeographic information technology, which provide backgroundfor these standards. It then proposes a tourism data infrastructure,
which applies these standards to the field of tourism.

2. Geographic information standards
In this section, we discuss what geographic information
standards are, how they are used, and more specifically, how they
are studied and used in Japan.
2.1 Geographic information standards and their application
Geographic information standards provide a framework forcreating geographic information specifications and systems that
use them. The goal of this standardization activity is to enablespecification of geographic information management, including
definition and description; tools; services; data acquisition,analysis, search, and representation; and transmission of data
among different users, systems and locations.
For example, in 2007 the European Union (EU) enacted
a directive called the Infrastructure for spatial information in
Europe (INSPIRE) and participating EU countries are eachcreating their own domestic laws for geographic information
standards in conformance with this directive. It is establishinga geographic spatial data infrastructure that will enablesharing of geographic data. Today, most countries in the EU
region publish spatial data conforming to this directive. TheInternational Hydrographic Organization (IHO) has alsoestablished profiles for the ISO/TC 211 standards (S57, S100,etc.), and many countries are using product standards based onthem to create global electronic navigation charts. The Open
Geospatial Consortium (OGC), an NGO, is also leading thecreation of many international specifications. For example,OGC has submitted a standard proposal called Geography
Markup Language (GML) to ISO/TC 211, and has publishedspecifications based on it, including City GML, for describing 3Dcity models and Indoor GML for describing indoor models. OGC
has also published the “14-083r2 Moving Features Encoding Part
I: XML Core,” specification for describing the motion of objects
such as people and vehicles within XML documents, based on theISO standard for describing moving features. The project leader
for this specification was Professor Ryosuke Shibasaki from The
University of Tokyo.
2.2 Geographic information standards study systems
As of March 2017, there are more than 51 standards forgeographic information. There are 39 voting member countries
participating in creating standards, and a further 28 countries withobserver status. Collaborating organizations include 25 within theISO, 35 other international agencies, and two others. Japan has
participated as a voting member since TC 211 was established in1994. Deliberation within Japan is done under the Association ofPrecise Survey and Applied Technology (APA).
In Japan, a geographic information JIS standardizationcommittee was formed under the domestic committee, to translate
ISO standards as needed and to work on the JIS X 7100 Japaneseindustrial standards. To promote these standards, the Geospatial
Information Authority of Japan (GSI) has established theJapan Profile for Geospatial Information Standard (JPGIS) for
terrestrial geographic information, specifications are being createdbased on it for geographic information provided by governmentand other public agencies, and the Japan Hydrographic
Association (JHA) is providing electronic navigation charts
according to IHO specifications (S57, S100, etc.), which conformto geographic information standards. The Japan Institute for
Promotion of Digital Economy and Community (JIPDEC) is alsoworking to create geographic information standards in Japan, andhas already created the Geographic information Place Identifier(PI) architecture, standardized as ISO 19155:2012.

3. Geographic information technology
knowledge systems
Here we discuss geographic information technology, which
provides background for geographic information standards, andthen give an overview of related systems and the knowledge
domains which are their constituents.
3.1 What is geographic information technology?
The Harmonized Model Maintenance Group (HMMG)
was created within ISO/TC 211 to check the consistency andNew Breeze Autumn 201719ensure compatibility between standards systems. As such,creating a mapping between the knowledge underlying different
sets of standards should make it possible to derive knowledge
systems required to process geographic information related tothese standards. Here, we refer to this collected knowledge as
Geographic Information Technology (GIT).
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “knowledge”
is defined as, “facts, information, and skills acquired throughexperience or education; the theoretical or practical understandingof a subject.”
According to this def inition, there are two types ofknowledge, namely facts or information, and skills. These
are generally called propositional and procedural knowledge
respectively. Most provisions in a standard have the form “In orderto A, follow a.” For example, expressions such as “To encode alocation in physical space, use the point as a geometric primitive,”

so such provisions are called propositional knowledge. On theother hand, skills required to behave according to the provisions
include ability to develop and operate information systems
conforming to the provisions. Both are collections of knowledge
for use in society, and can be considered to be elements of GIT.
3.2 Geographic information technology knowledge systems
Information processing can be regarded as basically sequences
converting input data to other data. Such sequences can be
expressed as directed graphs, with nodes representing data andthe knowledge required to convert it, and arcs connecting them.
These directed graphs comprise systems of propositional andprocedural knowledge. From this perspective, the GIT Body ofknowledge, including geographic information standards, can beillustrated as shown in Figure 1. This is based on the followingdeclaration, appearing in the scope of the geographic information■ Figure 1: Knowledge systems of geographic information technology conforming to geographic information standards

Requestor
SpaceManagement system

General feature model

Domain ofdiscussion

Real spaceStandard

Modeling

A

Acquisition

Analysis

General portrayal model

Application schema

Metadata

Geographic
data

Instance modeling

Instance model

Portrayal schema

Exchange

Representation

Geographic
information

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General instance modelManageInternal
data space

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Operation
Constraint

Application schema

DesignSpeciﬁcation

Virtualspace

Geographic data
for exchange
Metadata
for exchange

Shared data
spaceDatastandard, “The geographic information standard regulates
the management, acquisition, processing, analysis, search,representation and transmission of geographic data, including
its definition and description.” If we consider the definition anddescription of geographic data as “modeling”, processing andanalysis as “spatial analysis”, and search and transmission as“exchange”, we can say the geographic information standards
are based on the knowledge domains of modeling, acquisition,management, spatial analysis, exchange, and representation. These
domain categories are also used as the framework for the GIS&T
Body of Knowledge published by the University Consortium for
Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) in the United States.
As such, the geographic information technology knowledge
underlying the standards can be organized by matching theknowledge domains of each of the standards. Below, we discuss
the main standards and the technical knowledge underlying themfor each of the knowledge domains.
3.3 Modeling
Modeling is the activity of examining objects and phenomenaof interest occurring in the real world (the domain of discourse)and summarizing them in a conceptual model. To do so requires
a meta-model to express the structure of the conceptual model.
Within the geographic information standards, this is called theGeneral Feature Model (GFM) and its structure is specified
in ISO 19109-Rules for application schema ( JIS X 7109).
The conceptual models output as a result of modeling use aschema formulated for a specific field of application, so they
are called application schema. City GML, mentioned earlier, isone such application schema. To understand modeling requires
knowledge of a schema language for describing the model. The
Unified Modeling Language (UML) is used in the geographic
information standards. Knowledge of the application domain isalso required in order to create an application schema.
3.4 Data acquisition
Data acquisition is the activity of observing something andcreating geographic data according to an application schema.
There are many ways to acquire data, such as GPS positioning,indoor positioning, photogrammetric measurements, and remotesensing. Standards directly related to data acquisition include thoserelated to spatial reference (ISO 19111, ISO19112) and thoserelated to data quality (ISO 19113, ISO 19114). Underlying thesestandards is geodetic knowledge and knowledge of statistics anderror theory. Knowledge of the actual techniques used to collectthe data is also necessary.
3.5 Data management
Data management is the activity of systematically storing theacquired data and providing it to users as needed. Management
information technology is not necessarily specific to geographic

information, but among the geographic information standards
there is a metadata standard, ISO 19115-Metadata (JIS X 7115)
for describing geographic information. Data search mechanisms
for indexing geographic metadata are variously called geographic
information clearing house, geolibrary, or geographic data catalog.
Geographic extents are also used to search this data, so services
displaying background maps are needed so that the location ofthese domains can be seen at a glance. In Japan, the Geospatial
Information Authority provides its GSI Maps, which is this typeof service, and there are also non-governmental organizations
providing services, such as Google Maps and Open Street Map,
and geographic knowledge is required to implement these services.
3.6 Data analysis
Data analysis is the process of taking input geographic dataand converting it to information that is meaningful for users. Thisis generally called “processing”, but the word processing is also
used for modeling and data management, so we use “analysis” here
to distinguish from these other activities. There are no geographic
information standards for specifying analysis algorithms. For
example, among application schema, even though the expression“shortest path” appears, specific analysis methods are implemented
by the system developers. In fact, the standard notation
for showing analysis as an operation within a class in a UML
class diagram is an Application Programming Interface (API),according to the general object model. As such, knowledge forselecting and developing algorithms according to the requirements
shown in an application schema is part of geographic informationtechnology.
3.7 Data exchange
Data exchange is the ser vice of sending managed
geographic data to clients. A server encodes geographic datain some intermediate format according to an instance model,
which is the interface, and the client decodes and uses it. In thegeographic information standards, geographic data conforming
to an application schema is exchanged in the form of Extensible
Markup Language (XML) documents. ISO 19136-Geographymarkup language (GML)(JIS X 7136) has been standardized asa meta-model conforming to the general object model, to encode
these XML documents, so that geographic data can be exchangedin that form. Thus, to understand this knowledge domain requires
an understanding of XML, but there are also many other dataformats such as JSON (ECMA 404), CSV, Shape and DXF, soknowledge is also required to convert between these formats.
3.8 Geographic information expression
Expressing geographic information is the process of taking
geographic data as input and expressing it in a form that hasvalue for the user (mapping, conversion to speech or documents,etc.). One standard for visualizing geographic data using maps isNew Breeze Autumn 201721

ISO 19117:2012-Portrayal. This standard gives a general modelfor depicting functions and symbols, for converting geographic
features into symbols to be displayed on a map (such a place-namelabels). Design for expression is the process of creating a portrayal
schema for the geographic information being created, according
to this standard. Note that today, expression of geographic
information is not limited to ordinary maps, but includes
diverse means of expression such as statistical maps, interactive
maps that can be searched for local attributes after specifying alocation, walk-through videos, and 3D maps. As such, a morecomprehensive initiative is needed to organize this knowledge andstandardize these sorts of expression.

4. Potential for applications in tourism
Tourism is not the specialty of the author, so there may
already be a similar service, but we propose a potential application
below. There is a need for both competitiveness and collaboration
in tourism information services. As an example, services for
introducing and selecting tourism-related facilities would be
expected to have different content depending on the nature of
the site, but if information such as business hours was different,
it would cause confusion for users. On the other hand, it isdifficult for a touristic facility to know all of the sites that provide
information about it, so when the business hours are changed, it
is difficult to ensure that changes are made comprehensively on
all sites. This suggests that some of this basic data that needs tobe common, such as location, could be managed centrally by anintermediate organization, facilities could register their own data
there, and information services could reference and provide that
information to travelers or other entities that need it.
If this sort of tourism data infrastructure is to be built, it
would be preferable to provide the data and APIs for manipulating
it according to an international standard and in a commoninternational format. This would enable the data infrastructure to
be opened to services around the world, and not just domestically.
As shown more concretely in Figure 2, a database for thetourism data infrastructure would need to be studied, selecting
data items appropriate for the common platform. The results
would be shared with stakeholders, defining the scope of
discussion, and agreements reached on aspects such as application
schema and metadata describing data providers. Based on theagreements, data would be acquired, the database system would
be developed, and the formats and service APIs for the data being
provided would be published. Providers of the data registeredin the tourism data infrastructure could freely update their own
data, and service providers could reference the shared data anduse it in providing their own services. Considering issues like thedigital divide and multi-lingual data, data registration agency
services would also be needed. This would enable travelers toreceive personalized information services, based on data free ofinconsistencies, and better services could be provided throughcollaboration with tourism-related agencies such as police, fire
prevention, traffic management, and mapping facilities.

■ Figure 2: Proposed Tourism data platform organization

Tourism-related
establishment

Common/Public facility

Infrastructure
manager

Maps/disaster prevention/crime
prevention/traﬃc/weather/etc. data
Tourism basic data

Registration agent

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Service provider
Service database

Travelers, etc.
Tourism data

Tourism data
infrastructure

DigitalSignage