MGCP Portrayal Standard

The Multinational Geospatial Co-production Program (MGCP) is a multinational program to collect geospatial data worldwide, concentrating on areas where little data currently exists.

MGCP data is collected in accordance with the standards established in the MGCP Technical Reference Documentation, Version 4 (TRD4) and any related subversions: v4.1, v4.2, and so on. This establishes a MGCP Data Content Specification defined by a Feature Catalogue, an Extraction Guide, a Metadata and a Data Quality Standard.

This standard was developed by the Multinational Geospatial Co-production Program - Technical Group (MGCP-TG) in order for vendors and producers to ultimately portray MGCP data within a TRD4 schema on a hardcopy 1:50,000 or 1:100,000 topographic map.

This standard supersedes DGIWG 109, Portrayal Standard for MGCP Data, Edition 1.0, 17 November 2009.

Recommendations for improving this standard should be sent to the Multinational Geospatial Co- production Program - Technical Group (MGCP-TG) Chair for consideration.

The MGCP standard provides symbol rules that associate geospatial feature/attribute data instances from the MGCP TRD4 Feature Catalogue with agreed symbol specifications.

It also provides supplementary non-MGCP feature content and associated agreed symbol specifications required to develop content requirements to produce a topographic map.

MGCP data consists of vector data describing features in a 1x1-degree cell, exchanged using the ESRI Shapefile specification. Each Shapefile — and its corresponding database file — contains features of a single type and geometry. There is an overall metadata file (*.xml) that links all .shp files for the cell, and provides general information, such as the character encoding used for labels. LuciadLightspeed supports both zipped and unzipped MGCP data. A zipped MGCP data set contains both the metadata xml file as well as the shp files.