The scope of this International Standard is as follows:

Identification and definition of the architecture patterns for service interfaces used for geographic information and definition of the relationships to the Open Systems Environment model.

This International Standard presents a geographic services taxonomy and a list of example geographic services placed in the services taxonomy.

This International Standard prescribes how to create a platform-neutral service specification, and how to derive platform-specific service specifications that are conformant with this.

This International Standard provides guidelines for the selection and specification of geographic services from both platform-neutral and platform-specific perspectives.