The Digital National Framework (DNF) is a developing industry standard for integrating and sharing business and geographic information from multiple sources.

The vision for DNF is to enable and support easy and reliable integration of business and geographic information regardless of who is responsible for its maintenance and where this is undertaken, thus achieving the goal of "plug and play information".

Ultimately this has the potential to evolve into a network of information which, while distributed, when brought together can be used with assurance. Business information can then be shared with the knowledge that all users have confidence that they are referring to the same location and entity in the real world. This can be critical in many applications.

The Digital National Framework is intended to be:

1. Definitive - maximising the benefits of definitive referencing
2. Inclusive - reflecting principles of industry best practice
3. Structured - using effective techniques for a “create once, use many times” model
4. Reliable - delivering data integrity for underpinning critical business decisions
5. Cost-effective - lowering the costs of handling multi-source data
6. Flexible - enabling information exchange and cross-business applications

The DNF aims to create a structured model of national reference datasets, which will support consistent integration of geographic information, leading to easy, automated exchange and analysis of application information from different sources. The DNF will also aim to establish a consistent approach to georeferencing and in the modelling, integrity and connectivity of geographic information. It is this referencing structure that will allow for the continued maintenance of the data relative to the DNF.

The building blocks will be real world objects which are application-neutral and captured once for use by more than one application. An example would be a building, or area of road surface.  It is conceptualised in the following diagram:

Figure – cross referencing and linking multiple sources, such as NLPG and TOIDs

1Spatial attended the inaugural meeting on DNF and has been an advocate for its principles since that time. As well as attending and contributing to the DNF Expert Committee, 1Spatial also provides a staff member for DNF Marketing Communications.

www.dnf.org