Geospatial Data Standards and Practices in North Carolina
Standards facilitate the effective development, sharing, and use of geospatial data. The Working Group for Standards, a committee of the Statewide Mapping Advisory Committee (SMAC) of the NC Geographic Information Coordinating Council (GICC), was established to guide the development of standards for adoption or endorsement by the GICC.
Standards
The GICC has adopted or endorsed data content standards or technical specifications for a variety of geospatial data, including roads, water distribution and sanitary sewer systems, parcels and land use / land cover; and related technologies, including metadata, GPS, digital orthophoto base mapping and the US National Grid.
Notice: The final draft NC Technical Specifications for LiDAR Base Mapping was endorsed by the GICC on February 8, 2012. The standard is awaiting formal adoption by the Secretary of State, which is expected to occur soon.
To review GICC adopted and endorsed standards, see here.
Best Practices
To complement the adopted standards, the SMAC and the Working Group for Standards are developing a series of documents that offer a set of recommended practices for developing and maintaining geospatial data. In most cases, the best practices document will serve as a companion to a standard that has been adopted or endorsed by the GICC. The documents do not endorse particular software solutions or commercial services. The examples used to illustrate the concepts may be based on commonly used software among state and local GIS operations in North Carolina.
The purpose of these documents is to promote consistency in geospatial representation and data content to support regional analysis and planning, and statewide data sharing. The guides provide a detailed resource for data development and management in support of a variety of business needs. In practice, data managers may not use all of the recommended fields or may be inclined to add fields for jurisdiction-specific content.
Check this page for additional practices as they are adopted by the SMAC.