By June 15, 2000, each official national member organization in ISO/TC 211 was  invited to submit a SINGLE response to a questionnaire on the state of the GIS profession in the country. In the US, this response will be delivered to ISO by the Technical Committee L1 (Geographic Information Systems) of the National Committee for Information Technology Standards (NCITS). 

The US response to this questionnaire has been submitted. However, we have set up a discussion web if you have specific comments on this certification debate that you'd like to post publicly. Nancy Obermeyer will review and summarize this input periodically.

Following are several documents providing background and discussion about GIS professional certification issues.

• Background on the ISO GIS Professional Certification Effort

Draft of an article to appear in a much abbreviated form as part of Rebecca Somers' column in the May 2000 issue of Geo Info Systems.

• N573 - Proposal for a New Work Item on Geographic information/Geomatics - Qualifications and Certification of Personnel, 1998-09-16
• N639 - Result of voting on New Work Item Proposal, Document ISO/TC211 N573, 1999-01-04.
• N902 - Questionnaire regarding project 19122, Geographic information/Geomatics – Qualifications and Certification of personnel
• US Response to N902

• Draft of a recent article by William Huxhold, to appear in Geo Info Systems
• Draft of a recent article by Nancy Obermeyer, to appear.

• UCGIS White Paper on Accreditation and Certification, prepared for the UCGIS Education Challenges in June 1997 by Harlan Onsrud and Nancy Obermeyer.

• Summary of the discussion at the UCGIS Summit on Geographic Information Science Education, November 1998.

• Summary of the discussion at UCGIS Educational Challenges Workshop, June 1999.

• A slide show on Certifying GIS Professionals by William Huxhold.

• The URISA Education Committee's website on GIS Certification.

• The continuing discussion about the Surveyor's model law.

• ASPRS's Certification Program for Certified Mapping Scientist -- GIS.

• The IAAO's professional designation program for Cadastral Mapping Specialist

If you know of any additional webpages that address the question of Professional Certification for GIS or relevant related topics, please send the URLs to Karen Kemp.