The NPS Cultural Resource Spatial Data Transfer Standards

In 2002, under OMB Circular A-16, the National Park Service was made the lead agency for developing standards for spatial data on cultural resources. The NPS Cultural Resources GIS Facility (CRGIS) became the main programme carrying out that task. In 2008 the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) voted unanimously to sponsor mandatory federal-wide spatial data standards for cultural resources, developed under CRGIS's leadership.

CRGIS works with the NPS GIS Council and the NPS Cultural Resources Subcommittee, and with NPS programmes and partners, to develop and refine the standards for exchanging GIS data within the Park Service. As parks, regions and programmes put the standards to use, CRGIS offers them training and guidance.

It is also the Cultural Resources Theme Lead for the FGDC's National Geospatial Data Assets, responsible for making federal and national datasets available and accessible — among them the Park Service's own spatial data for the National Register of Historic Places.

What the standards are for

The NPS Cultural Resource Spatial Data Transfer Standards give a framework for organising the agency's spatial data on cultural resources, recording where the data came from, and making it easier to combine and share.

The NPS GIS Council set up formal procedures for creating internal standards and approved these in February 2010, with the Park Service acting as the federal lead under the FGDC. Federal-wide standards, following OMB Circular A-16 and FGDC rules, were then developed from the internal ones.

The main benefit is organised, documented data that can be shared between parks, between parks and regions, among regions, and between parks or regions and programmes. The standards help keep spatial data consistent, of good quality and accurate. Using location to link 15 existing cultural resource databases across the directorate also lets users explore every side of a cultural resource in ways not otherwise possible.

The standards have also underpinned a national, enterprise-level Cultural Resources GIS dataset. Run as an ArcGIS Enterprise dataset, it shows cultural resources geographically and makes the data accessible while keeping sensitive information secure. Using the standards gives a way to show how the same resources relate across different databases and programmes.

The cultural resources data model behind the standards. NPS Cultural Resources GIS Facility.

What they cover

The standards deal only with how cultural resources are represented spatially and with the accuracy of feature-level metadata, which records how each spatial feature was created. They leave aside the descriptive information already held in the Park Service's cultural resource databases.

They set out:

• 18 data layers, based on the National Register of Historic Places' types of cultural resource;
• 34 fields of feature-level metadata, describing each feature's geographic parameters and how it relates to individual parks and regions.

A geodatabase model comes with the standards so that parks, regions and programmes can move their data quickly into a structure fit for accurate sharing. The guidance document is updated as technology changes. The standards, the guidance and the geodatabase template are on the NPS DataStore.

Corrected: one sentence of the NPS page expands FGDC as the "Federal Geospatial Data Committee"; elsewhere the page, and the committee itself, use Federal Geographic Data Committee.

Sources

• National Park Service, Cultural Resources GIS Facility, "NPS Cultural Resources Data Transfer Standards." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/cr_datastandards.htm
• The standards: https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/DownloadFile/639911
• Guidance documents: https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/Reference/Profile/2206878
• Geodatabase template: https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/Reference/Profile/2206880