Further Insights into Geospatial/Geodetic Engineering

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This Article is part of the Systems Engineering and Geospatial/Geodetic Engineering (GGE) Knowledge Area. It discusses in more detail a selected set of topics that a beginner in Geographic Information Systems (GIS)Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and science or a systems engineersystems engineer adopting respective techniques might be interested in and/or should be aware of. Topics discussed include bodies of knowledgebodies of knowledge on geospatial technologies, various aspects associated with geographic data, and standardization in the geospatial domain.

GIS related Bodies of Knowledge

The emphasis of the article “Overview of Geospatial/Geodetic Engineering” was to focus on to what extent systemssystems and systems of systemssystems of systems are dependent on GIS related technologies and where potential interfacesinterfaces or contributions are. In order to provide now an improved but still brief overview of what topics are related in general to geospatial and geodetic engineering and how broad the geospatial domain actually is, a high-level introduction into existing bodies of knowledgebodies of knowledge in the geospatial domain shall be provided.

The work on a body of knowledgebody of knowledge (BOK) for the geospatial domain actually goes back into the 1980s (cf. Kemp & Goochild 1991, cited in Stelmaszczuk-Górska et al. 2020), and since then at least two major workstreams have evolved. One in the United States that culminated first 2006 with the publication of Edition 1 of the Geographic Information Science and Technology Body of Knowledge (GISTBoK) by the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) (DiBiase et al. 2006). For the Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT) discipline, a refinement was elaborated by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF). The UCGIS GISTBoK also formed the nucleus for the other workstream in Europe which started with the GI-N2K: Geographic Information – Need to Know project (Vandenbroucke and Vancauwenberghe 2016) that aimed to better reflect European aspects in a BOK and to provide an ontological structure of concepts and relationships (Hofer et al. 2020). The European workstream was then further pursued as part of the Earth Observation for Geoinformation project (EO4GEO) that refined and extended the work from GI-N2K (Stelmaszczuk-Górska et al. 2020; Hofer et al. 2020).

UCGIS: Geographic Information Science and Technology Body of Knowledge (GISTBoK)

For the 2006 GISTBoK a hierarchical decomposition of the geospatial domain was conducted into 10 Knowledge Areas which were again divided into 73 Units and then into 329 Topics. There were over 1600 Learning Objectives listed in these topics. With the update that began in 2013 (Wilson 2014), there are also 10 Knowledge Areas in the current GISTBoK but have changed versus the 2006 version. As of beginning of 2022, there are 54 Units and 363 Topics. The current Knowledge Areas are:

  • Foundational Concepts, with 7 Units and 35 Topics;
  • Knowledge Economy, with 4 Units and 20 Topics;
  • Computing Platforms, with 5 Units and 28 Topics;
  • Programming and Development, with 5 Units and 23 Topics;
  • Data Capture, with 8 Units and 35 Topics;
  • Data Management, with 7 Units and 53 Topics;
  • Analytics and Modeling, with 9 Units and 70 Topics;
  • Cartography and Visualization, with 6 Units and 36 Topics;
  • Domain Applications, with 44 Topics (with no categorization into Units); and
  • GIS&T and Society, with 3 Units and 19 Topics.

It should be noted however that the GISTBoK is constantly evolving and for the latest version the respective GISTBoK online resource has to be checked. Additionally, a unique feature of this BOK is that many Topics are linked with respective articles providing insights into the subjects at hand. The UCGIS also provides at its web site besides to access to the UCGIS BOK information on open educational resources on GIS and GIScience.

USGIF: GEOINT Essential Body of Knowledge

Aside to the activities hosted by the UCGIS that were mainly driven by academia, the USGIF published in 2014 the first version of its GEOINT Essential Body of Knowledge that targeted the GEOINT discipline. It was based amongst others on the 2006 GISTBoK (DiBiase et al. 2006) but extending it where necessary to better reflect the extended needs of GEOINT and related industries. The second version (Brooks et al. 2019) was published in 2019 after an 18 months period of preparation with a survey in the GEOINT community and involving various subject matter experts to interpret the results of the survey. It serves as a guide what skills are required in the GEOINT discipline and acts as a blueprint for respective Certified GEOINT Professional exams (Brooks et al. 2019; Baber 2018). The GEOINT Essential Body of Knowledge version 2.0 is divided into three parts. The first one is related to “Technical Competencies” with the following areas:

  • GIS & Analysis Tools;
  • Remote Sensing & Imagery Analysis;
  • Geospatial Data Management; and
  • Data Visualization.

The second part is related to “Cross Functional Competencies” which cover general skills like soft skills or common GEOINT knowledge and practices suitable for the GEOINT practitioner, whereas the third part is looking at “Emerging Competencies”, like data science, machine learning techniques, virtual reality and artificial intelligence, unmanned aerial platforms. It is worth to mention that USGIF also publishes since 2015 the “State and Future of GEOINT Reports” on a yearly basis. These may also serve as a general reference on future trends in geospatial technologies.

Europe: The "GI-N2K: Geographic Information - Need to Know" and the "EO4GEO: Earth Observation for Geoinformation" BOKs

The GI-N2K project funded by the European Union's (EU) Erasmus Lifelong Learning Program and its BOK started as well with the 2006 GISTBoK (DiBiase et al. 2006) and had 10 Knowledge Areas. For these Knowledge Areas 63 sub-concepts were identified and further divided into 301 on level 3. However, in some instances level 3 was even further de-composed into level 4 and partly into level 5 concepts. At the end, 411 concepts were defined on these levels. Additional features that were provided with this BOK were curriculum design tools and a GeoWiki to enable discussion between experts.

The most recent development in European GIS-related BOKs is the EO4GEO BOK that continues and further develops as part of the Erasmus+ Sector Skills Alliance project EO4GEO the work conducted in the GI-N2K project. As Earth Observation (EO) and Geoinformation (GI) data sources, especially from the space sector, are gaining nowadays much more importance for data capture and updates of derivative data, the respective skills for data capture, information processing, standalone and combined analysis and associated applications need to be defined and matched or merged with the previous BOKs to reflect this change in academia, business and applications (Stelmaszczuk-Górska et al. 2020). An analysis revealed that "neither the American nor the European GIS&T (comment: Geographic Information Science and Technology) and GI-N2K BOKs include comprehensive information on EO" (Stelmaszczuk-Górska et al. 2020). Additionally, since there was a criticism that the previous BOKs were too much oriented along education driven by academia and too theoretical with a lack of practical aspects, an emphasis was made to “better align” the academically oriented EO4GEO BOK “with the business, professional, and industrial perspective” (Hofer et al. 2020) by analyzing a set of relevant business processes with regard to applicable concepts.

The EO4GEO BOK has at its highest level 14 subconcepts as follows:

  • Analytical Methods, with 14 subconcepts;
  • Conceptual Foundations, with 8 subconcepts;
  • Cartography and Visualization, with 6 subconcepts;
  • Design and Setup of Geographic Information Systems, with 4 subconcepts;
  • Data Modeling, Storage and Exploitation, with 5 subconcepts;
  • Geocomputation, with 4 subconcepts;
  • Geospatial Data, with 4 subconcepts;
  • GI and Society, with 6 subconcepts;
  • Image processing and analysis, with 6 subconcepts;
  • Organizational and Institutional Aspects, with 5 subconcepts;
  • Physical principles, with 2 subconcepts;
  • Platforms, sensors and digital imagery, with 4 subconcepts;
  • Thematic and application domains, with 5 subconcepts; and
  • Web-based GI, with 7 subconcepts.

Similar as with the GIN-2K BOK, there are partly also further levels below the subconcepts. In addition to the BOK it provides an occupational profile tool, a job offer tool, a curriculum design tool, a BOK annotation tool, a BOK matching tool and other educational features. For the concepts, their names are given along with descriptions and references. A set of 5 relationships between the concepts is maintained, and skills explaining the practical use of the EO*GEO knowledge are associated with the concepts (Hofer et al. 2020). The BOk exploration is supported by a graphical tool.

Geographic Data and Metadata

Geographic Data

Geospatial data is actually the fuel needed for any type of geographic application, whether it might be only for visualization purpose, e.g. as background information for real situational awareness applications, or for advanced spatial analytics involving different data sources and specific analysis methods. A first categorization into the two fundamental concepts of geospatial data has already been given in Article “Relationship between Systems Engineering and Geospatial/Geodetic Engineering”. They are:

  • Continuous fields, i.e. spatially distributed phenomena with no clear limits or boundaries and representing “the real world as a finite number of variables, each one defined at every possible position” (Longley et al. 2015). For the case that repeated pattern of positions is used, the term raster data is commonly used, especially for the case that an equidistant matrix pattern is used. However, a matrix could potentially have different resolutions in columns and rows, or theoretically also other regular patterns could be involved, such as hexagonal patterns, but these applications are very rare.
  • Discrete objects or features, which are delimited by boundaries and potentially associated with a set of attribute data to describe them further beyond their spatial properties. This type of data is also termed vector data in a GIS context.

Beyond these two fundamental concepts, the different aspects that need to be considered for geospatial data when designing a system using this data are very diverse and cannot be treated in full detail here. A selection of important key words coming from practical experiences to be considered when implementing GIS databases include:

  • What data is actually needed (examples see below)?
    • At what scales shall the data be visualized, i.e. the level of detail needed.
    • Dimensionality: typical dimensionalities used in GIS technologies are:
      • 2D, describing the earth surface in a flat plane, like a paper map;
      • 2.5D, with a unique z-value to a position in the horizontal plane;
      • 3D, where all three dimensions are considered; and
      • Time dimension: for the case of 3D data then 4D, but as also the former 2 cases may have variations in time this is treated here as time dimension.
    • What are the critical infrastructures that need to be shown, such as transport networks (include reference to term!!!)?
  • What standards need to be considered, such as feature catalogues, interface and data format standards, data acquisition standards etc.?
  • What is the positional accuracy (include as term) required for the geographic data? This is typically associated with data acquisition method to be selected and obviously with the costs involved.
  • What is the level of semantic detail needed, e.g. how many feature attributes (include as term!!) shall be captured for feature / vector data and how big is the set of domain values from which they shall be selected?
  • Are there complex topological relations to be captured and maintained, i.e. to estabish connectivity for the vector data, for example for routing (include as term!!!) applications or utility networks (include as term!!!)?
  • Questions on updates:
    • How often needs the data to be updated? This is directly related to maintenance costs for the database, i.e. recurring costs to be considered, but also to availabilty of resources for the updates.
    • How shall the data be updated? Is it possible to use a central service for the data which is updated, i.e. can the responsibility for the updates be delegated?
  • What are the data sources that may or have to be used? How are bounding conditions on the use of the data?
    • Authoritative data from a spatial data infrastructure, from international or national governmental agencies (or even intergovernmental agencies), such as national surveys like the USGS or the British Ordnance Survey, or on an international level the United Nations.
    • Commercial data sources, such as satellite imagery service providers, or mapping service providers.
    • Open sources, from activities like the Open Street Map or Open Seamap initiatives.
    • Copyrights and Intellectual Property Rights associated with the data sources.
    • Classification of data.
    • Bounding legal conditions (e.g. export control laws and regulations for export of data, as for example some satellite image resolutions may have export restrictions).
    • Liability aspects for the data, especially for the cases of legal boundaries, i.e. national borders. This is of particular relevance when borders are under dispute between neighboring countries!


Metadata

metadata (include term in glossary!!!) especially ISO 19115

Example: The United Nations 14 Global Fundamental Geospatial Data Themes

The set of geographic data to be used in a systemsystem will always be dependent on the purpose and goals of the systemsystem at hand and therefore no general purpose structure can be provided here. Some examples of geographic data have already been given in Article “Relationship between Systems Engineering and Geospatial/Geodetic Engineering” in the frame of Geospatial Aspects in Modeling and Simulation. In order to extend this for a better and broader overview of what may considered as relevant in general, the following list of geospatial data themes may serve as a first indicator. It has been elaborated as "The 14 Global Fundamental Geospatial Data Themes" by the United Nations Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM, 2019).

  • Global Geodetic Reference FrameGeodetic Reference Frame;
  • Addresses, such as postal addresses (include term in glossary!!!), see below;
  • Buildings and Settlements;
  • Elevation and Depth (include term in glossary!!!), e.g. provided by Digital Elevation Models (include as term in glossary!!!) and Digital Terrain Models (DTM)Digital Terrain Models (DTM);
  • Functional Areas, such as administrative or legislative areas;
  • Geographical Names, e.g. geographical identifiersgeographical identifiers managed provided by a gazetteer (include as term in glossary!!!), see below;
  • Geology and Soils;
  • Land Cover (include term in glossary!!!) and Land Use (include term in glossary!!!);
  • Land Parcels, e.g. a cadastre or a land register;
  • Physical Infrastructure, including industrial and utility facilities;
  • Population Distribution;
  • Orthoimagery (include term orthoimage!!!), which is a special case of geographic imagerygeographic imagery in orthogonal projection;
  • Transport Networks (include term in glossary!!!), e.g. rails, roads, waterways and air transport routes associated potentially with connectivity relations; and
  • Water, including rivers, lakes and marine features (include term in glossary!!!).

The UN-GGIM (2019) provides more insights and information into the themes, e.g. what standards are available and possible sources for data.

Geocoding Systems, Localization and Geographic/Spatial Search

coordinates see also ISO 6709, gazetteer (include term!!!) with geographic identifiers, addresses (include term!!!), different postal address types (include term!!!), country codes (ISO 3166-1, ISO 2020a) and codes of country principal subdivisions such as states and provinces (ISO 3166-2; ISO 2020b), hierarchical and non-hierarchical geocodes, what3words, UN-LOCODE which is based on ISO 3166-1 , ISO 2020a, etc.

Practical Considerations

size of data for updates in heterogeneous communication networks, single source of information via service approach. Again, Tomlinson (2019) and Peters (2012) as well as the online successor to this text book, System Design Strategies

Standardization Organizations active in the Geospatial Domain

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) was founded in 1994 and publishes open standards and specifications in the geospatial domain. The documents are created in a member-driven consensus process. Most successful standards are the Web Map Service (WMS; OGC XXXX) and the Web Feature Service (WFS; OGC XXXX).

OGC works closely with ISO TC211 (see next section), and some documents are jointly elaborated and published. For example, the above mentioned WMS is also an ISO standards (namely ISO 20XX), as ist the WFS (ISO 20XX). Another example is the specification of the Geography Markup language (OGC, 2012; and ISO, 2015 & 2020) that is published by both OGC and ISO. Special care has to be taken which version is published in which document since they are not necessarily published in the same versions at the same time. Several companies wellknown to the general public such as Amazon Web Services, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, and universities, governmental, inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations as well as individuals are members of the OGC at different levels of membership, summing up to more than 500 members.

ISO TC 211 “Geographic information/Geomatics”

Publishes standards, including abstract specifications and interface standards, and also maintains the Online Multi-Lingual Glossary of Terms (MLGT) at Geolexica that was used to define terms used in this knowledge area.

International Hydrographic Organization (IHO)

IHO (2017) provides insights how hydrographic offices can support the creation of spatial data infrastructures.

The Defence Geospatial Information Working Group (DGIWG) and NATO

World Meteorological Organization (WMO)

References

Works Cited

Baber, M. 2018. “Geospatial Intelligence and National Security.” In: The Geographic Information Science & Technology Body of Knowledge (1st Quarter 2018 Edition), John P. Wilson (Ed.). DOI:10.22224/gistbok/2018.1.2

Hofer, B., S. Casteleyn, E. Aguilar-Moreno, E.-M. Missoni-Steinbacher, F. Albrecht, R. Lemmens, S. Lang, J. Albrecht, M. Stelmaszczuk-Górska, G. Vancauwenberghe and A. Monfort-Muriach. 2020. “Complementing the European earth observation and geographic information body of knowledge with a business-oriented perspective.” Transactions in GIS 24(3):587-601. DOI: 10.1111/tgis.12628.

IHO. 2017. Spatial Data Infrastructures "The Marine Dimension". Guidance for Hydrographic Offices. Publication C-17, Second Edition, Version 2.0.0, January 2017. Monaco: International Hydrographic Organization.

ISO. 2020a. ISO 3166-1:2020, Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions – Part 1: Country codes. Geneva, Switzerland: International Organisation for Standardisation.

ISO. 2020b. ISO 3166-2:2020, Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions – Part 2: Country subdivision code. Geneva, Switzerland: International Organisation for Standardisation.

ISO. 2009. ISO 6709:2009, Standard representation of geographic point location by coordinates. Geneva, Switzerland: International Organisation for Standardisation.

Longley, P.A., M.F. Goodchild, D.J. Maguire, and D.W. Rhind. 2015. Geographic Information Science and Systems, (4th edition). New York, Chichester, Weinheim: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Stelmaszczuk-Górska, M. A., E. Aguilar-Moreno, S. Casteleyn, D. Vandenbroucke, M. Miguel-Lago, C. Dubois, R. Lemmens, G. Vancauwenberghe, M. Olijslagers, S. Lang, F. Albrecht, M. Belgiu, V. Krieger, T. Jagdhuber, A. Fluhrer, M. J. Soja, A. Mouratidis, H. J. Persson, R. Colombo, and G. Masiello. 2020. Body of Knowledge for the Earth Observation and Geoinformation Sector - A Basis for Innovative Skills Development, Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci., XLIII-B5-2020, 15–22, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-archives-XLIII-B5-2020-15-2020 .

UN-GGIM. 2019. The Global Fundamental Geospatial Data Themes. New York, United Nations.

Vandenbroucke, D. and G. Vancauwenberghe. 2016. “Towards a New Body of Knowledge for Geographic Information Science and Technology.” Micro, Macro & Mezzo Geoinformation 2016 (6):7-19.

Wilson, J.P. 2014. Geographic Information Science & Technology Body of Knowledge 2.0 Project. Final Report 2014 University Consortium for Geographic Information Science Symposium, Pasadena, California.


Primary References

David DiBiase, Michael DeMers, Ann Johnson, Karen Kemp, Ann Taylor Luck, Brandon Plewe, and Elizabeth Wentz (Eds.). 2006. Geographic Information Science and Technology Body of Knowledge Ed. 1.

Brooks, T., Kantor, C., Spuria, L. and Quinn, K. (Eds.). 2019. The Geospatial Intelligence Essential Body of Knowledge, Version 2.0/2019, Compiled by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation. January 2019. Accessed January 20, 2021. Available: https://usgif.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ebk2019.pdf.

Peters, D. 2012. Building a GIS: Geographic Information System Planning for Managers, (2nd edition). Redlands, CA: Esri Press.

Tomlinson, R.F. 2019. Thinking About GIS: Geographic Information System Planning for Managers., (5th edition). Redlands, CA: Esri Press.

Website of the EO4GEO BOK. Accessed January 20, 2022. Available: http://www.eo4geo.eu/bok/.

Website of the UCGIS GISBoK. Accessed January 20, 2022. Available: https://gistbok.ucgis.org/.

Additional References

TBD

DRAFT SEBoK Article

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