CONTACT:  Patricia Viets, NOAA            FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
          Carol Gerlitz, NOAA/NGDC        2/13/98

High-resolution geodetic control data for the United States are now available on the World Wide Web in a format compatible with Geographic Information System (GIS) software, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced today. GIS vendors are developing translators to import the data in these new formats into their products.

The new format is the Point Profile of the Spatial Data Transfer Standard (SDTS), which was developed by NOAA for high-precision point data. World Wide Web users can retrieve the SDTS geodetic control data on-the-fly directly from a data base that is continuously updated by NOAA's National Geodetic Survey.

Geodetic data have been available on the World Wide Web for quite some time, but only in the standard "data sheet" format. Unlike the SDTS files, the data sheet format is a text file that is not easily loaded into a database or GIS.

Web access to the geodetic control data is a joint project of two NOAA agencies, the National Geodetic Survey in Silver Spring, Md., and the National Geophysical Data Center in Boulder, Colo.

"NOAA is to be commended for the leadership it has demonstrated in this project," said Richard Hogan, who chairs the Standards Working Group of the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC), an interagency group. The SDTS geodetic control data are compliant with the proposed FGDC accuracy standard for geodetic control networks and FGDC-compliant metadata have been created. The FGDC has endorsed the SDTS, and this is the first implementation of a framework in this SDTS-compliant data.

The data are available at: http://www.ngs.noaa.gov (Select Products and Services, then select DataSheet).

More information on the project is available at: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/tools/sdts or by calling Carol Gerlitz.