ISO/IEC 18025:2014

Information technology — Environmental Data Coding Specification (EDCS)

ISO/IEC 18025:2014 provides mechanisms to specify unambiguously objects used to model environmental concepts. To accomplish this, a collection of nine EDCS dictionaries of environmental concepts are specified: classifications: specify the type of environmental objects; attributes: specify the state of environmental objects; attribute value characteristics: specify information concerning the values of attributes; attribute enumerants: specify the allowable values for the state of an enumerated attribute; units: specify quantitative measures of the state of some environmental objects; unit scales: allow a wide range of numerical values to be stated; unit equivalence classes: specify sets of units that are mutually comparable; organizational schemas: useful for locating classifications and attributes sharing a common context; and groups: into which concepts sharing a common context are collected. A functional interface is also specified. As denoting and encoding a concept requires a standard way of identifying the concept, ISO/IEC 18025:2014 specifies labels and codes in the dictionaries. ISO/IEC 18025:2014 specifies environmental phenomena in categories that include, but are not limited to, the following: abstract concepts (e.g., absolute latitude accuracy, geodetic azimuth); airborne particulates and aerosols (e.g., cloud, dust, fog, snow); animals (e.g., civilian, fish, human, whale pod); atmosphere and atmospheric conditions (e.g., air temperature, humidity, rain rate, sensible and latent heat, wind speed and direction); bathymetric physiography (e.g., bar, channel, continental shelf, guyot, reef, seamount, waterbody floor region); electromagnetic and acoustic phenomena (e.g., acoustic noise, frequency, polarization, sound speed profile, surface reflectivity); equipment (e.g., aircraft, spacecraft, tent, train, vessel); extraterrestrial phenomena (e.g., asteroid, comet, planet); hydrology (e.g., lake, rapids, river, swamp); ice (e.g., iceberg, ice field, ice peak, ice shelf, glacier); man-made structures and their interiors (e.g., bridge, building, hallway, road, room, tower); ocean and littoral surface phenomena (e.g., beach profile, current, surf, tide, wave); ocean floor (e.g., coral, rock, sand); oceanographic conditions (e.g., luminescence, salinity, specific gravity, turbidity, water current speed); physiography (e.g., cliff, gorge, island, mountain, reef, strait, valley region); space (e.g., charged particle species, ionospheric scintillation, magnetic field, particle density, solar flares); surface materials (e.g., concrete, metal, paint, soil); and vegetation (e.g., crop land, forest, grass land, kelp bed, tree).