Part 1 — Functional specification
Part 1 — Functional specification
SEDRIS (ISO/IEC 18023) is a technology that can be used to represent and interchange environmental data. This part of ISO/IEC 18023 defines the semantics and structure used to represent environmental data along with the means to produce and access that data. A SEDRIS transmittal is the realization of an environment using the SEDRIS data representation model (DRM) that can be produced and accessed through the SEDRIS application program interface (API) specified in this part of ISO/IEC 18023. A unified view of environmental data accelerates the development of applications based on such data and allows different applications to interchange environmental information. Environments may be natural, man-made, or virtual and incorporate a wide range of types of objects including celestial bodies, rivers, forests, ocean characteristics, atmospheric characteristics, avatars, ships, roads, space stations, buildings, and animals. The characteristics of such objects need to be described and the relationships among them specified. This International Standard was developed to address these needs.
ISO/IEC 18023 in its entirety specifies a data representation model, an abstract transmittal format, a binary encoding, and an application program interface. Together, these components support creating and accessing SEDRIS transmittals as a data interchange mechanism for representing environments. Two additional International Standards, ISO/IEC 18025 — Environmental data coding specification (EDCS) and ISO/IEC 18026 — Spatial reference model (SRM), are required to completely and unambiguously describe environmental data.
The SEDRIS interchange mechanism uses the SEDRIS Data Representation Model (DRM), in conjunction with the EDCS and the SRM, to provide a means for defining all of the data elements and their relationships necessary to create environmental data. These components form the central core of successful environmental data interchange and allow the unambiguous description of environmental data. The DRM can be expanded to incorporate future environmental representation needs.
The SEDRIS API is the component of the interchange mechanism that provides the means to create and access data in a SEDRIS transmittal. It enables the interchange of environmental data between different proprietary database systems or formats. The API allows the underlying implementation of the SEDRIS transmittal to be transparent to users.
Complete and unambiguous data representation
SEDRIS specifies a standard approach to describe and communicate environmental information. This approach to representation of environmental data includes support for all domains of the environment, including ocean, terrain, atmosphere, and space. In addition, SEDRIS supports the various techniques that are used to model environmental data in a variety of information technology applications. Since such potentially diverse models and representations can describe the same object, or concept, through different data models, SEDRIS also includes the means to capture the polymorphic relationships of these representations. Furthermore, the DRM includes the necessary data elements, and their relationship to one another, that are needed to describe the environment fully and seamlessly across all domains.
Universal, lossless data interchange
By providing a complete and unambiguous data representation and a robust interchange mechanism, SEDRIS enables the lossless interchange of data. The standard access interface, and the polymorphic representation of data through the DRM, ensures that users can share a common description of the environmental data.
Standardized software interface
The SEDRIS API provides a consistent interface between a software application designed to process the environmental data and the underlying SEDRIS transmittal. The API decouples all SEDRIS data-consuming or data-producing applications from the SEDRIS transmittal’s data structures, allowing the format, its data structures, and the application to evolve independently of each other.
The SEDRIS API supports many ways of accessing and manipulating SEDRIS transmittals. The contents of a transmittal may be traversed object by object or searched based on data attributes and spatial coverage. Access to data in SEDRIS transmittals is designed to be context-sensitive to support representational polymorphism. Search filters allow limiting the number of objects that are examined.
The SEDRIS API provides the means to efficiently interact with complex data types, such as data tables or images. The API also supports conversions between different spatial coordinate systems, units of measure, and colour representations.
http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/ISO_IEC_18023-1_Ed1.html