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It must be recognized that every standardization effort that is underway at the 
national, regional or international level can not succeed. Harmonization amongst these 
efforts is mandatory if we are to reach our shared objective. Convergence to one 
family of geospatial standards is not impossible. The challenge is to make this 
objective a reality. 
Within Canada, under the auspices of the Canadian General Standards Board (CGSB) 
Committee on Geomatics (COG), we have created a formal standards process. To 
date we have developed several standards, the Geomatics Data Sets: Cataloguing 
Rules and another covering directories of geomatics data bases. With respect to 
exchange standards we have developed a mechanism to handle both de jure and de 
facto standards. The COG recently adopted both SAIF, developed by the province of 
British Columbia, and DIGEST, as two of the Canadian Geomatics Interchange 
Standards (CGIS). SAIF has been categorized as a general standard while DIGEST is 
a defined standard. Both of these efforts can coexist by developing registered profiles 
within the general standard compliant with the defined standard. Other ongoing 
activities involve establishing standards for a national feature and attribute catalog. 
Similarly, other national standards boards have in place comparable efforts. Two 
examples of regional efforts is that of the European Committee for Standardization 
(CEN) Technical Committee 207 on Geographic Information and the NATO Military 
Agency for Standardization (MAS), Interservice Geographic Working Party. At the 
international level, there are several concurrent activities ongoing. Three such efforts 
are; the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) and the S-57 standard, the 
Digital Geographic Information Working Group (DGIWG) and the DIGEST standard, and 
the most recent activity being the formation of an ISO Technical Committee on 
Geomatics, based on a Canadian proposal. It is through the latter where true 
standardization efforts will take place. Therefore, it is imperative that people invest 
in geospatial standards now while the opportunity exists to influence the outcome. 
It is not well known that Canada is the custodian nation for DIGEST both within 
DGIWG and NATO, and perhaps in the future in ISO. 
Most of the efforts today, even the most progressive ones, are too conservative or 
pessimistic. Discussion is still about common data sharing architectures and how to 
handle the legacy and propriety data bases that exist today. Perhaps in the military 
geographic community, because of our increased world wide mandate, we tend to 
take a more proactive or aggressive view. We feel that it is possible to address the 
exchange of standard geospatial data between producers, producers and users, and 
between users. If the standards process is in place, the standards are developed, vast 
amounts of data are readily available, and the tools to exploit them, then it is realistic 
to envision a single or at the worst a very small number of standards for geospatial 
data. A trend is already apparent as leading GIS companies and third party integrators 
develop robust bidirectional translators, some have even gone as far as to rewrite their 
GIS engine to be compliant to emerging world standards, such as DIGEST. 
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