To meet the tremendous cross-discipline application requirements in NGIS environment, a fundamental prerequisite is the ability to efficiently and conveniently share geospatial data produced by different organizations. In such a sharing environment, professional data produced by domain-specific organizations are particularly important because they are irreplaceable. The EPA began to implement three-year project for drafting the “Environmental Quality Data Standard” in 2009, which aims to develop a distribution mechanism based on the OpenGIS technology and expand the scope of applications by using the ISO 19100 series of international standards. The goal of this project is to draft the standard for data belong to the category of “pollution control, environmental sanitation, noise and vibration, and non-ionized radiation”. Following the procedures of analyzing the property of data, designing application schema and data dictionary, and establishing encoding transformation, the drafted standard allows 16 types of such data to be distributed in open GML format. The completion of this standard represents the completion of the “Environmental Quality Data Standard”, altogether 45 types of data can be thus distributed on the basis of geospatial web services. This enables users from various discipline to easily acquire data that meets their demands and develop Internet-based GIS. Focusing on the future development, the completion of this standard implies the GIS mechanism for EPA is entering a new age of internet application environment and will play an active role in the future sharing environment of NGIS.

data standard;Geography Markup Language (GML);National Geographic Information system (NGIS)