Digital Geographic Information Exchange Standard (DIGEST) Digital Geographic Information Working Group

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the Digital Geographic Information Exchange Standard (DIGEST), which is a general-purpose interchange standard intended for the exchange of digital geographic information between agencies, from suppliers to agencies, and for the distribution of digital products from agencies and distributors to end users. DIGEST is a “define” standard in which it specifies one (or at most a few) way to interchange a set of geographic data. This is in contrast to a “general” standard that provides a multiplicity of structures and allows any kind of geographic data to be interchanged. The DIGEST family of standards also addresses the needs for interchange of different types of data handling vector data (at several levels of topology), raster data, as well as matrix data. The coherent structure for the exchange of all of these data types is provided in the body of the DIGEST standard. In addition to this the chapter also provides information on the Digital Geographic Information Working Group (DGIWG).