On February 2, 2005, the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office (DMSO) issued a press release announcing the approval for publication of the following SEDRIS standards: the Environmental Data Coding Specification (EDCS), ISO/IEC 18025, and its associated EDCS Language Bindings-Part 4: C, ISO/IEC 18041-4. DMSO is the sponsor for the development of the SEDRIS suite of standards. There are a total of eight SEDRIS related ISO standards, of which these are the first two to be approved for publication. The remaining six are at the final draft international standard stage and should be balloted and approved by spring 2005.

Dr. Louis Hembree at NRL Monterey has played a key role in the development of the standards. He has served as the METOC subject matter expert on the development team and as vice chair of the U.S. InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) H3.9 subcommittee that is processing the SEDRIS standards in the U.S. He was a co-editor of the EDCS standard and has served on the U.S. delegation to the ISO meetings.

The EDCS is a dictionary of environmental terms and concepts and includes more than twelve thousand initial entries. It can be used anywhere that standard naming conventions are required. EDCS has a wide coverage of environmental concepts, and includes terrain, atmospheric, ocean, space, urban, etc. It provides standard labels and associated definitions for use in an application. The terms and concepts included in the EDCS can be extended through a registration process.

TEDServices has been discussing and planning to take advantage of the EDCS for its use with space and terrain data. SEDRIS is required for DoD modeling and simulation programs. There are also many in the international community that are using the SEDRIS technologies. The European military and M&S community use SEDRIS and the standards will be referenced as NATO standards. The South Koreans have shown how they are using SEDRIS in conjunction with cell phones, animations, and as data exchange capability between commercial CAD systems