ISO 19119:2016 defines requirements for how platform neutral and platform specific specification of services shall be created, in order to allow for one service to be specified independently of one or more underlying distributed computing platforms.

ISO 19119:2016 defines requirements for a further mapping from platform neutral to platform specific service specifications, in order to enable conformant and interoperable service implementations.

ISO 19119:2016 addresses the Meta:Service foundation of the ISO geographic information reference model described in ISO 19101‑1:2014, Clause 6 and Clause 8, respectively.

ISO 19119:2016 defines how geographic services shall be categorised according to a service taxonomy based on architectural areas and allows also for services to be categorised according to a usage life cycle perspective, as well as according to domain specific and user defined service taxonomies, providing support for easier publication and discovery of services.