Geodata Discovery Working Group

This is a Working Group started by the Public Geospatial Data Committee.

While OSGeo can consider hosting sets of public geodata, (and for the purposes of offering maintained packages of high-quality data for education and demonstration, it probably will), we can compile a set of best practises and references to good prior art for building and maintaining collections of data and metadata.

Focus

 * Metadata for collections of geographic information.
 * Providing best practise and prototypes for geodata search facilities
 * Help with providing input into the OSGeo repository/services at http://osgeo.telascience.org/
 * Providing 'catalog'/discovery/search services as part of OSGeo activities in promoting access to public domain and open licensed bodies of data.

Participants

 * Jo Walsh
 * Schuyler Erle
 * David Bitner
 * Perry Nacionales
 * Markus Neteler
 * Arnulf Christl
 * please add yourself

Existing and related projects

 * Mapdex is "a global Index of 2,018 servers, serving 37,168 map services, containing over 400,000 GIS Layers, covering more than 4,000,000 columns!"
 * GeoTorrent hosts BitTorrents of shapefile/TIFF format data.
 * GeoNetwork "Find Interactive Maps, GIS datasets, Satellite Imagery and Related Applications"
 * DLESE Collection System offers a metadata repository and editor

Public Datasets for Possible Mirroring or Distribution

 * Gazetteer Data (basically placenames with coordinates)
 * NGA GNS Gazetteer
 * WorldWind Placenames (markusN can provide PERL to read this)
 * Geonames.org gazetteer


 * Vector data
 * VMAP0 - 1:1Mio, very generalised vector data for many features, around 70 layers
 * GSHHS - world coastlines, different scales available
 * TIGER/Line (USA) - street and addressing data for the US
 * RNF (Canada) - street and addressing data for Canada
 * OpenStreetMap - data available through a HTTP based XML interface. They've also been getting requests for shapefile and GML output of their data.


 * Raster data
 * DEM
 * SRTM V2
 * ETOPO2
 * TOPEX: SRTM30 (with GTOPO30 data for high latitudes where SRTM data are not available)
 * Satellite Data
 * Landsat (OnEarth mirror already at telascience)
 * Blue Marble / Blue Marble Next Generation (mirror already at telascience)
 * ASTER
 * MODIS
 * Maps derived from Satellite Data
 * AVHRR Landuse Map from GLCF
 * natural earth
 * City lights