PROCESSORS

ESRI announced details of its participation at the recent Standards in Action meeting sponsored by the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. The highlight of the meeting was the 3rd GML Relay, which challenges GIS vendors to exchange data using the GML standard. The standard was developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC), and is designed to transport and store geographic information. GML is an encoding of Extensible Markup Language (XML). For the relay, 1:10,000 scale topographic data for the Netherlands (Top10NL) was used in the GML format (Top10GML). The basic procedure for the GML Relay is for a participant to read a GML file that has been modified by the previous participant, edit some features, and then create a new GML file for the next participant. For its part, ESRI used its ArcGIS Desktop software with the Data Interoperability extension, which directly supports Top10GML. The ESRI Nederland team was able to access the Top10GML data in direct read mode and analyze the data without first converting it. The team also demonstrated the consistent user interface within the ArcGIS environment. The results of the relay (written GML documents, small ppts, and, when finished, the evaluation of the written files) are available at http://www.gdmc.nl/wereldGISdag2004/relay. "The success of the 3rd GML Relay has inspired us to advance the date of our next GML Relay to the latter part of this year. We will be using the latest version of the data from Topographic Service Kadaster (Netherlands), which is currently being refined based on GML3. We will also be expanding participation and hope to involve participants throughout the world," said Professor Peter van Oosterom of the Delft University of Technology, organizer and chairman of the relay. Concludes David Danko, senior consultant, GIS Standards at ESRI, and keynote speaker at the meeting, "Proper implementations of GML and other open standards are fundamentally important to further interoperability and the use of GIS technology. GIS users must be able to find the information and geoprocessing tools needed for their work, regardless of physical location, and then employ those tools and information regardless of their original platform."