Announcement
On 29 May 2025, the IEEE Standards Board cast the final vote approving IEEE 2874-2025 — transforming five years of collaborative work into the third foundational internet protocol ever ratified.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association (IEEE SA) has officially ratified IEEE 2874-2025: the Spatial Web Protocol, Architecture, and Governance Standard — defining the Hyperspace Modeling Language (HSML) and Hyperspace Transaction Protocol (HSTP).
The standard was developed over five years by a diverse IEEE SA Working Group drawing from industry, government, academia, and civil society, with more than 100 global organizations contributing. It achieved 92% first-ballot approval, with two subsequent re-circulations underscoring its broad consensus support across a worldwide community of stakeholders.
Working Group Chair George Percivall called the approval "monumental and historical," noting that the Spatial Web is now positioned as a foundational protocol for scalable, collective intelligence in physical-digital environments.
Context
Scale
IEEE 2874-2025 is considered the third foundational internet protocol ever ratified — following TCP/IP and HTTP — establishing the rules for how intelligent agents, devices, and humans share a common spatial world model.
Scope
The standard enables secure, interoperable collaboration between AI agents, IoT devices, robotic systems, and digital infrastructure — at global scale, across organizations and jurisdictions.
Ethics Foundation
Built on ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 System Architecture and the IEEE 7000 series on the Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, governance is not an afterthought — it is embedded in the architecture.
Geospatial Integration
OGC GeoPose 1.0 is a normative reference within IEEE 2874-2025, anchoring all Spatial Web entities to precise, interoperable real-world positions — bridging spatial computing and geospatial infrastructure.
GeoRoundtable Role
George Percivall served as Working Group Chair throughout the five-year development of IEEE 2874-2025, bringing his combined expertise from NASA, the Open Geospatial Consortium, and IEEE standards leadership.
Technical Specifications
The standard introduces three interlocking components that together create a spatially-grounded, interoperable layer for the physical-digital world.
Identifier Layer
A universal identifier scheme that unifies how people, machines, software agents, places, and objects are referenced within the Spatial Web — enabling a coherent, globally consistent graph of real and virtual entities.
Modeling Language
A human- and machine-readable semantic data ontology schema describing entities and their relationships in the Spatial Web. HSML covers four dimensions — space, structure, behavior, and trust — with each entity spatially anchored through OGC GeoPose.
Transaction Protocol
A protocol underwriting the automated contracting required to build a coherent, decentralized, secure, and privacy-respecting Spatial Web. HSTP governs how agents, devices, and systems exchange spatial context, sensor data, and instructions in real time.
Together, SWIDs, HSML, and HSTP ensure that humans, machines, and software agents share a single spatially-grounded graph — the core prerequisite for trustworthy, decentralized coordination between autonomous systems operating in the physical world.
George Percivall described the Spatial Web as "an ecosystem of intelligent agents coordinating activities toward shared goals," adding that "using space as the organizing principle, the standard is a foundational leap toward scalable, collective intelligence."
"Monumental and historical. The Spatial Web standard is a foundational leap toward scalable, collective intelligence — using space as the organizing principle."
— George Percivall, IEEE Working Group Chair, June 2025
The approval of IEEE 2874-2025 represents the culmination of five years of collaborative standards work involving more than 100 organizations across industry, government, academia, and civil society — spanning the USA, Europe, the Middle East, South America, New Zealand, and beyond.
The standard's architecture reflects a core GeoRoundtable conviction: that governance, ethics, and interoperability cannot be retrofitted onto complex systems — they must be engineered in from the foundations. The integration of IEEE 7000 ethics standards and ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 architecture frameworks reflects exactly this philosophy.
With OGC GeoPose as a normative reference and a global community behind it, IEEE 2874-2025 sets the stage for a new generation of trustworthy autonomous systems operating across the physical and digital worlds.
Resources
Official Announcement
Spatial Web Foundation Announces IEEE Approval
IEEE Standards Page
IEEE 2874-2025 — Official Standard Record
Interested in how IEEE 2874-2025 applies to your systems, architecture, or standards work? Get in touch.
✉️ percivall@ieee.org