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Glossary
This glossary lists common geospatial terms and acronyms, particularly those relating to the New Zealand and Pacific region.
The Open Geospatial Consortium also provide an extensive glossary of terms.
| ABLOS | Advisory Board on the Law of the Sea |
| ANZLIC | Australian and New Zealand Land Information Council |
| ASDD | Australian Spatial Data Directory |
| ASIBA | Australian Spatial Industry Business Association |
| ASIERA | Australasian Spatial Information Education and Research Association |
| BSU | Basic Spatial Unit |
| Catalogue | A set of service interfaces which support the organisation, discovery, and access of geospatial information. Catalogues assist in the organisation and management of diverse geospatialdata and services for discovery and access. They are also used to discover resource information from diverse sources and gather it into a single, searchable location and provide a means of locating, retrieving and storing the resources indexed by the catalogue. |
| CDS | Computerised Documentation System |
| CIESIN | Center for International Earth Science Information Network |
| CLCS | United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf |
| Collection | An aggregation of one or more items. |
| Content metadata standard | An open specification that itemises a set of elements and their meanings. Each element is tagged with an identifier (e.g., "Title", "Author") that distinguishes the element from other elements within the standard. In addition, each element has a set of constraints or rules specifying the allowable content of the element and its relationship to other elements within the standard. Content metadata standard are typically developed to support a specific community of interest (St. Pierre and LaPlant, 1999). |
| Controlled vocabulary | A subset of natural language, consisting of preferred and non-preferred terms. The primary purposes of a thesaurus are identified as promotion of consistency in the indexing of documents and facilitation of searching. |
| CRCSI | Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information |
| CSDGM | Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata |
| Data set | A logically meaningful grouping or collection of similar or related data. |
| DGIWG | Defence Geospatial Information Working Group |
| Directory service | A service which stores and manages descriptions of metadata and provides a searchable interface by which descriptions can be found and retrieved. |
| EOSDIS | Earth Observing System Data and Information System |
| ESRC | Economic and Social Research Council |
| Feature | A computer representation of an actual or hypothetical object or event that has measured, or potentially measured, location. Also viewed as geospatial information elements represented as feature types (or feature objects) such as roads, park benches, lands, events, images, DEMs, feature collections etc. (OGC, 2000a). |
| Feature type | A category assigned to a feature from a controlled vocabulary in order to allow for the accessing of information on different features on the basis of the category type they fall under. |
| FIG | International Federation of Surveyors |
| Gazetteer | At its simplest, a list of place names with their associated geographic location. |
| GEBCO | General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans |
| GEG | Geospatial Executives Group. GEG governs the work of the New Zealand Geospatial Office. |
| Generalised footprints | These include points that represent the approximate centre of a feature (or points derived by some other method) and bounding boxes that represent the maximum latitude and longitude extents of a region. |
| GEO | Group on Earth Observations |
| GEOSS | Global Earth Observation System of Systems |
| GEO profile | Geospatial Metadata Profile |
| Geo-coding | The process of assigning to location-based resources explicit geospatial co-ordinates, in a known spatial reference system. Geo-coding augments location-based text (or graphic) references with geospatial co-ordinates (or some other spatial reference). The primary types of geo-coding include: - Gazetteer service, which geo-codes place name, landmark, point or interest, and so forth (Place Name Geo-coding). A gazetteer is both a structured vocabulary and a feature collection, and thus may support, from the same data structure, all the capabilities of a hierarchical thesaurus and a Web Feature Server. - Address matching service, which determines the co-ordinates for a given address. - Feature geo-coding services, which utilise vector maps, tables or other means for obtaining the point, line and area geometry associated with common, location-based coding and naming schemes, like postal codes, districts etc. |
| Geo-data | Refers to the full spectrum of digital geographic data. Examples include: digital maps, raster image data, point vector, vector data, spatial/temporal data etc. |
| Geographic footprint | Co-ordinates representing the location of a named place. See also Generalised footprints. |
| Geospatial information | Information about objects or phenomena that are associated with a location relative to the surface of the Earth. A special case of spatial information. |
| Geo-linking | The ability to link disparate resources that contain location-based information. It is the process of establishing some logical spatial or temporal relationship between resources that are significant to the user. By linking resources from source to target, it is possible to organise information by easily navigating linked resources. It is either a manual or automatic process. |
| Geo-parsing | The processing of scanning text messages and text documents for location-based references, such as place names, addresses, postal codes, etc., in preparation for passage to a geo-coding fusion service. |
| Geospatial data | Any data with a geospatial reference. For example, an Ordnance Survey National Grid reference, postal address, place name or administrative area. |
| Geospatial reference | Encompasses both geo-data and geo-services. It is the basic (but abstract) unit of geospatial information in a networked computer system environment. It is a unit of trade in a geospatial information sharing transaction—the primary geospatial item exchanged through geospatial commerce. It is also the primary object manipulated by geospatial software applications. |
| GI | Geographic Information |
| GIAG | Geospatial Information Advisory Group |
| GIS | Geographic Information Systems |
| GITA | Geospatial Information and Technology Association |
| GML | Geography Markup Language |
| GNS | GEOnet Names Server |
| GRSS | IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society |
| GSDI | Global Spatial Data Infrastructure |
| Hub | A single access point where searches can be performed and directed towards distributed services (nodes) hosting metadata. |
| IAG | International Association of Geodesy |
| ICA | International Cartographic Association |
| ICAO | International Civil Aviation Organisation |
| ICSM | |
| IHO | International Hydrographic Organisation |
| IMTA | International Map Trade Association |
| Information landscapes | This or the term 'landscape' is used to describe a way of presenting different views of information resources to users, according to their interests and needs. Also called Iscapes. |
| IOC | Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission |
| ISCGM | International Steering Committee for Global Mapping |
| ISO/TC 211 | ISO/TC 211 Geographic Information |
| ISPRS | International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing |
| JB GIS | Joint Board of Geospatial Information Societies |
| LINZ | Land Information New Zealand |
| Location | Location is a position in space and time that can be measured and whose co-ordinates can be derived in a particular spatial and temporal reference system. (OGC, 2000a). |
| Metadata | Data about data. Metadata describes how and when and by whom a particular set of data was collected, and how the data is formatted. |
| NZGO | New Zealand Geospatial Office |
| OGC | Open Geospatial Consortium |
| OGP | International Association of Oil and Gas Producers |
| OS | Ordnance Survey |
| OSDM | Australian Office of Spatial Data Management |
| OSGeo | Open Source Geospatial Foundation |
| PCGIAP | Permanent Committee on GIS Infrastructure for Asia and the Pacific |
| PSMA | PSMA Australia Limited, formerly known as Public Sector Mapping Agencies, is an unlisted public company wholly owned by the State, Territory and Australian Governments. It combines spatial data from Australia's governments with technology to create national spatial information datasets. |
| SCAR | Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research |
| SCUFN | GEBCO Sub-committee on Undersea Feature Names |
| SOPAC | Pacific Islands Applied Geoscience Commission |
| UCGIS | University Consortium for Geographic Information Science |
| UNESCO | United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation |
| UNGEGN | United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names |
| UNGIWG | United Nations Geographic Information Working Group |
| UNRCCAP | United Nations Regional Cartographic Conference for Asia and the Pacific |
