Federal Information
Processing Standards Publication 173-1
1994 June 10
Announcing the Standard for
SPATIAL DATA TRANSFER STANDARD (SDTS)
Federal Information Processing Standards Publications (FIPS PUBS) are issued by
the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) after approval by the
Secretary of Commerce pursuant to Section 111(d) of the Federal Property and
Administrative Services Act of 1949 as amended by the Computer Security Act of
1987, Public Law 100-235.
1. Name of Standard. Spatial Data Transfer Standard (SDTS) (FIPS PUB 173-1.
2. Category of Standard. Software Standard, Information Interchange.
3. Explanation. This standard provides specifications for the organization and
structure of digital spatial data transfer, definition of spatial features and
attributes, data transfer encoding, and topological vector profile. The purpose
of the standard is to promote and facilitate the transfer of digital spatial
data between dissimilar computer systems.
Work on a national spatial data transfer standard was initiated by the National
Committee for Digital Cartographic Data Standards, American Congress on
Surveying and Mapping in 1982 to develop a comprehensive set of data exchange
standards for the profession. In 1985, the Standards Working Group of the
Federal Interagency Coordinating Committee on Digital Cartography also began
work on spatial data exchange standards. During 1987, the results of these
parallel efforts were merged by the Digital Cartographic Data Standards Task
Force into the proposed Digital Cartographic Data Standard, published as a
special issue of The American Cartographer in January 1988.
Subsequent testing, modification, and refining of the specifications were done
by the Spatial Data Transfer Standard Technical Review Board. These efforts
resulted in the approval and issuance of the Spatial Data Transfer Standard
(SDTS) as Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Publication 173
consisting of three parts: Part 1 - Logical Specifications, Part 2 - Spatial
Features, Part 3 - ISO 821 1 Encoding. The revision of this standard adds Part
4, the Topological Vector Profile (TVP). The TVP is a limited subset of SDTS
specifications for the transfer of vector data, it also specifies several
changes and clarifications to Parts 1 and 3 of SDTS. They are as follows:
a. many-to-many and many-to-one relationships between spatial objects and
attributes are permitted (Section 5.3);
b. composite objects which do not contain component objects are permitted
(Section 5.4);
c. the Entity Authority and Attribute Authority subfields in the Data
Dictionary/Schema module may contain a maximum of 8 characters; if Part 2 of the
SDTS is the source of a definition the subfield shall contain "SDTS-USA"; a
provision for standard feature registers of other countries has been added
(Section 5.12);
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