EPSG?

The European Petroleum Survey Group was apparently formed back in the 1980's to help coordinate all of the oil and gas drilling that was going on in the North Sea and other offshore projects. Their major work was building a database of all of the survey coordinate systems in use worldwide at that time.

The group no longer exists, but the work has been taken up by others. If you go to EPSG.ORG or do a google search for EPSG 2277 then you should find the information you need.

We've started to add the EPSG number to the coordinate information on our drawings. With so many coordinate systems that have similar names it helps to include a unique identifier.

More details at www.epsg-registry.org

I'm on the subcommittee (Geodesy, of the Geomatics committee) that manages the registry, so feel free to ask me any questions about it.

The schema of the registry follows ISO 19111 standards, so the structure of a coordinate reference system may seem odd or...overly complicated at first.

As Steve said, EPSG merged with OGP (Oil and Gas Producers) years ago, but it was decided that the EPSG "name" was too popular to change. OGP just re-branded itself as IOGP (International Oil and Gas Producers).

IOGP publishes many guidance notes on various topics of interest to their members. The Geodesy subcommittee guidance notes include a long one documenting many of the projection and other transformation algorithms that are in the registry. To access them you need to register but the information's never sold.

The websites, spatialreference.org and epsg.io are not affiliated with the registry.

Melita Kennedy

Thanks for all the information. Been in the field and have not been checking replies. This is what I was needing to know.