Withdrawal
While the SDTS had provided a common mechanism for transferring digital geospatial data among different systems and for sharing and integrating data from many diverse sources", Geography Markup Language (GML) now satisfies the encoding requirements that SDTS provided.GML is an open, vendor-neutral eXtensible Markup Language (XML)
encoding for transport and storage of geographic information. It may be
combined with other XML encodings that support varied data
applications. GML furnishes the default payload-encoding for
transporting geographic features in Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
Web Feature Services. GML was originally developed by OGC, which is an
international industry consortium of nearly 500 companies, government
agencies and universities that participate in a open consensus process
to develop publicly available interface standards. The OGC lists 40
organizations with 89 products with 95 implementations of GML
3.2.1.
GML 3.2.1 was subsequently approved and published as an ISO
standard (ISO being the International Organization for
Standardization), ISO 19136:2007, and as an American National Standard.
The OGC lists 40 organizations with 89 products with 95 implementations
of GML 3.2.1. The FGDC has endorsed GML 3.2.1. GML 3.2.1 is also listed
as a mandated standard in the Department of Defense Information
Technology Standards Repository (DISR), which means that systems
procured by the DoD must comply with GML.