Along with Roger Payne, I served on the Features Working Group of the National Committee for Digital Cartographic Data Standards, a project of ACSM that led to the adoption of the Spatial Data Transfer Standard as a Federal Information Processing Standard.  The Features Working Group developed Part 2 of SDTS, "Spatial Features."  Following the adoption of SDTS in 1993, I went on to lead the work item on "Feature Cataloguing Methodology" of the newly formed International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Technical Committee 211 (Geographic Information/Geomatics).  I have also served since 1993 on the American National Standards Institute accredited technical committee L1 (for GIS standards) as the project leader for "Geospatial Objects and Codes."  (The L1 committee would be the logical place to refer a proposed work item for the standardization of digital gazetteer information.)

I question the assertion in the workshop proposal that feature type schemes "need to be hierarchical."  Relationships and operations are at least equally important as bases for feature classification, and the resulting classes are unlikely to be hierarchically ordered.  Hierarchies vary with applications and with cultures.  I strongly doubt there is such a thing as a "generally applicable" hierarchy of feature types.

The fundamental question in devising a strategy for standardization is the definition of a "digital gazetteer."  In particular, what aspects of geographic data searching and retrieval are not included in this concept, if any?  Depending on the answer to this question, either (a) there are many current and proposed GIS standards for which digital gazetteers are already in scope or (b) digital gazetteers may constitute a new and somewhat different area for future GIS standardization.