Geodata Committee Meeting 20060322

Public Geospatial Data Committee Meeting 2006-Mar-22

Meeting Info

 Chair: Jo Walsh
 Minutes: Schuyler Erle
 IRC: #osgeo channel on irc.freenode.org
 Date: 2006-Mar-22 (at least in the Americas and Europe)
 Time: Wednesday March 22, 15:00 UTC

Agenda Items

• Introductions
  • Who are in the Committee?
• Discuss focus of group - accessing data versus enabling tools for creating data or something in between?
• How to take stock of what is available? Are we aiming to have a repository of data or pointers to external data?
  • Outreach - if people are working on repository efforts already, how can we connect with them?
• Geodata licensing is a pressing issue. The Public Geodata license has invoked calls for an LPGL model without a ShareAlike constraint. Can we start a working group on this?

• Schedule next committee meeting
• Please Add Agenda Items

Minutes

• Attendance: Jo Walsh, Frank Warmerdam, David Bitner, Jeff McKenna, Alan Doyle, Schuyler Erle, Markus Neteler, Perry Nacionales, Florian Kindl, Daniel Brookshier

Group Focus

• Accessing data? enabling tools for creating data? or something in between? -- consensus is we want both a portal for accessing existing geodata *and* tools for creating new data.

• Portal for accessing existing data
  • Sources of data
    • Packaged data sets (e.g. TIGER/Line, VMap0, ...)
    • Web services (OGC-compliant services, OPeNDAP)
  • Allan: "there have been lots of attempts... at first, all you need is pointers to the data & services... but to gain critical mass, you have to fill the catalog with good stuff..."
  • Jo proposes an Action Item to compile a list of existing portals
    • http://www.refractions.net/white_papers/ogcsurvey/
    • http://gcmd.nasa.gov/index.html
    • http://www.geotorrent.org/
    • http://metrogis.org/
    • http://nationalatlas.gov/
    • Canadian CGDI
    • ...
• Tools for creating and editing data
  • Agreed to be within the group's focus
  • Deferring making plans to act on this for now

Taking Stock of Existing Data

• Catalog existing data? and/or host a repository? no consensus yet.
• Process data into more usable formats?
  • TIGER/Line, VMap0, GSHHS
  • Packaging data also means fixing metadata
• Provide a forum/marketplace for data wanted / data offered?
• Daniel Brookshier notes that OSGeo.org can host some data
• Proposed we break this into two work groups
  • Catalog / Discovery Portal (+ Outreach)
  • Packaging / Quality Control / Metadata Augmentation / Documentation (focus on education, e.g. GRASS Spearfish)
• Outreach
  • Geodata Committee's efforts should coordinate closely with Education Committee
  • External outreach can proceed informally for now (as the committee gets bootstrapped)

Geodata Licensing

• Lots of discussion around OpenStreetMap and the ShareAlike provision of its Creative Commons license, and around creating an LGPL-like license specifically for geodata
  • The core issue is what constitutes a "derived work" from geodata
  • OSGeo can help add clarity to the discussion
• Public Geodata License... can we envision/propose an LPGL?
• http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/geo-discuss/2006-March/000132.html contains an overview of existing discussion
• Proposed we start a working group to research and enumerate geodata licensing possibilities
• Goal state is to list a set of licenses that OSGeo software packages can offer as configuration defaults for people publishing their own data

New Working Groups

1. Data Discovery / Access
2. Packaging / Reuse / QA / Maintenance
3. Licensing

Next Meeting

Next meeting in exactly one week, Wed 29th March 2006, 1500 GMT.