Office of the Chief Information Officer &
High Performance Computing and Communications
NOAA Web Mapping Applications Policy - Industry Standard Formats
All NOAA data that is available for download will be made available in appropriate industry standard formats. The following is a list of common standards organizations endorsed by common standards organizations that adopt, develop, and endorse standards related to geospatial data access, data publication, and data formats. Those organizations are:
- Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
- KML - Keyhole Markup Language (KML) is an Extensible Markup Language (XML) grammar and file format for modeling and storing geographic features such as points, lines, images, and polygons for display in GIS applications. KML language is used by a variety of GIS and mapping applications including Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Maps for mobile, NASA WorldWind, ESRI ArcGIS Explorer, Adobe PhotoShop, AutoCAD, and Yahoo! Pipes. The specifications are freely available to the public and available to the user community without charge or restriction. To reduce file size, KML files may be compressed using standard compression tools. These compressed (or "zipped") files are stored with the file extension KMZ (zipped KML files).
- Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC)
- International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
- World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) working draft of " Publishing Open Government Data."
Other commonly used geospatial data formats that are not endorsed by the above standards organizations, but are considered "industry-standard for purposes of the NOAA Web Mapping Applications Policy are:
- ASCII - The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is a code for representing English characters as numbers, with each letter assigned a number from 0 to 127. Most computers use ASCII codes to represent text, which makes it possible to transfer data from one computer to another.
- CSV - A comma-separated values (CSV) file is used for the digital storage of data structured in a table of lists form, where each associated item (member) in a group is in association with others also separated by the commas of its set. CSV files are often used for moving tabular data between two different computer programs, for example between a database program and a spreadsheet program.
- GeoRSS is a formal Geography Markup Language (GML) that provides a way to encode location in Real Simple Syndication (RSS) and Atom (an XML language used for Web feeds) feeds. More information on Geography Markup Language is available from the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc (OGC) site at http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/gmlwg.
- HDF5 (Hierarchical Data Format 5) is a data model, library, and file format for storing and managing data. It supports an unlimited variety of data types, and is designed for flexible and efficient I/O and for high volume and complex data.
- NetCDF (network Common Data Form) is a set of software libraries and machine-independent data formats that support the creation, access, and sharing of array-oriented scientific data.
- Shapefiles are a geospatial vector data format for geographic information systems software. Shapefiles spatially describe points, polygons, and polylines. A "shapefile" commonly refers to a collection of files with ".shp", ".shx", "dbf", and other extensions on a common prefix name (i.e., "lakes:).
To submit other formats for inclusion as "industry-standard" on this site contact Kim.Jenkins@noaa.gov.