AGeoP-08 NATO geospatial metadata profile

What it is

AGeoP-08 is the NATO Allied Geospatial Publication that sets out which metadata a geospatial dataset, map, chart or image plan has to carry when it is produced or exchanged for NATO use. It is Edition B, Version 1, promulgated in February 2019, and it was "approved by the nations in the Military Committee Joint Standardization Board" before promulgation. It does not define a metadata structure from first principles: clause 2.2 requires compliance with the DGIWG Metadata Foundation (DMF), the wider defence community's metadata profile built on the ISO 19100 series, and clauses 2.3 to 2.6 then add four further Standards Related Documents (SRDs) covering the DMF's use in a NATO environment, that environment's codelists, its Shapefile encoding, and the naming of hardcopy land maps, aeronautical charts and image plans. Nations record their agreement to use the publication "in STANAG 2586."

Who actually implements it

The document does not name a commercial audience. The entities it shows actually implementing it are national defence geospatial organisations: Germany's national reservation names "The Bundeswehr Geoinformation Service with the Bundeswehr Geoinformation Center in Euskirchen" as its single point of contact for providing and exchanging geospatial information for NATO activities, and restricts its own implementation of STANAG 2586 to that service's area of responsibility. Reservations from France, Croatia and Slovenia show the same pattern: each nation decides its own scope and timing. France ties full implementation to "increment 2 of the GEODE 4D program," due after 2022, applying only STANAG 2586 Edition 2 within a narrower national scope before that. A commercial supplier producing geospatial data for a NATO or national programme meets this profile because a contract or national programme requires it, not because AGeoP-08 addresses suppliers directly.

Five requirements, all the same shape

Chapter 2 is short, entirely normative, and made up of five requirements, each a "SHALL be compliant to" pointing at another document rather than a self-contained specification:

• Clause 2.2 requires compliance with the DGIWG Metadata Foundation itself, described as "a

general Defence metadata profile for datasets, series, services, tiles, documents, products and non-geographic datasets."

• Clause 2.3 requires compliance with SRD 08.1, which covers using the DMF "in a NATO

Environment (NATO lead operations, exercises or national use)."

• Clause 2.4 requires compliance with SRD 08.2, the codelists used within that NATO environment.
• Clause 2.5 requires compliance with SRD 08.3, the Shapefile implementation of the DMF.
• Clause 2.6 requires compliance with SRD 08.4, the naming rules for hardcopy land maps,

aeronautical charts and image plans - content that used to be its own publication, AGeoP-9, before this edition absorbed it.

What is easy to miss: AGeoP-08 does not itself list a single metadata element. It is a profile of a profile, naming which DMF baseline and which four SRDs a NATO geospatial metadata record has to follow; the field-by-field requirements live in those referenced documents, not in this cover publication. An auditor checking conformance would need to check a dataset's metadata against those SRDs directly, not against AGeoP-08's own text.

What edition B replaced

Edition B, Version 1 is effective on receipt and supersedes AGeoP-08 Edition A, Version 2. It also absorbs a document that was previously separate: AGeoP-9, Edition A, Version 1, whose hardcopy-map naming rules were "formerly referenced as AGeoP-9 Edition A, Version 1 (STANAG 7136)" and now sit inside clause 2.6. The superseded editions are, per the promulgation letter, to be destroyed according to local document-destruction procedure rather than kept in circulation.

Prerequisites and related documents

Clause 1.2 names the ISO documents the DGIWG Metadata Foundation itself is built on: ISO 19115:2003, ISO 19115/Cor.1:2006, ISO 19115-1:2014, ISO 19115-2:2009, ISO/TS 19115-3:2016, ISO/TS 19139:2007, ISO 8601:2004, ISO 639-2:1998 and ISO 19106:2004, plus IETF RFC 3629, RFC 3986 and RFC 4122. Where a geospatial record needs confidentiality labelling, STANAG 4774 / ADatP-4774 supplies that syntax, and clause 1.2 also names AJP-3.17 Geospatial Support alongside NATO Geospatial Policy MC 296/3 as related reading.

How compliance is checked

AGeoP-08 does not name who checks compliance or how. It describes no certification scheme, no government-surveillance regime and no self-declaration mechanism; each of its five requirements is only ever the same "SHALL be compliant to" clause pointing at another document. What it sets is a structural condition on a dataset's or system's metadata, not an assessment process, and it says nothing about audits, inspections or formal sign-off.

Getting the document

AGeoP-08 is unclassified and free of charge. NATO's Standardization Document Database lists the current edition; we do not host a copy or sell it.

Standards it references

• STANAG 4774Background
• ADatP-4774Background
• AJP-3.17Background