Geodata Committee Meeting 20060406

Public Geospatial Data Committee Meeting 2006-Apr-06

Meeting Info

 Chair: Jo Walsh
 Minutes: Schuyler Erle
 IRC: #osgeo channel on irc.freenode.org
 Date: 2006-Apr-06 (at least in the Americas and Europe)
 Time: Wednesday, 16:00 UTC

Agenda Items

Old Business

• Review minutes from last meeting
• Actions from previous meeting

New Business

• Specific discussion of data sets to be hosted at Telascience
• Deciding on baseline Geodata Metadata Requirements
• Any other business?

Minutes

Attendance

Schuyler Erle, John Graham, Jeff McKenna, Jo Walsh, Frank Warmerdam

please add yourself ;-)

IRC Log

Data Hosting

• The Public Geospatial Data Committee (e.g. 'we') plans to host data at http://osgeo.telascience.org/, courtesy of John Graham and the SDSC.
• Agreed we should start by hosting +/- two showcase data sets, one raster, one vector.
• Agreed we should host these datasets in their original formats first, before adding derivative/value-added versions.
• Agreed we should host download via HTTP, download via BitTorrent, and OGC Web Service access.
• Agreed we should peer datasets through GeoTorrent. Noted that they have data format requirements for hosted data sets that may not meet our needs -- e.g. VMap0. Frank Warmerdam will speak with Richard Orchard of GeoTorrent about this.
• Schuyler volunteers to sketch out a plan for hosting two initial datasets, most likely VMap0 and Blue Marble NG (both of which John already has downloaded to the server).

Metadata Standards

• Concern over metadata standards like FGDC that may be irrelevant or raise too high a barrier to contribution by users.
• Discussion of the basic minimum of metadata attributes to make a data set useful
  • File format
  • Projection
  • Text description
  • Ownership/provenance
  • License
  • Source URL
• Recommended we look at MetaLite, a Windows program for creating basic FGDC metadata.
  • http://edcnts11.cr.usgs.gov/metalite/help/fgdc.html lists "the smallest complete "core" of the FGDC standard that would still give sufficient basis for creating a clearinghouse"
• Action Items
  • Jo agrees to work out what is already expressed in very common metadata namespaces like Dublin Core and FOAF versus what may need to be expressed in a custom or domain-specific (e.g. GML) namespace (such as representing projection, extent data etc that can be inferred from OGR).
  • John will talk to GEON participants about their work in agreeing on common metadata.