Fourth Geodata meeting + biweekly summary

[Jo Walsh]

dear all, 

Yesterday's meeting was a bit staggered; it's been surprising hard to
keep the fixed-time links on the wiki correct during daylight savings
changes and meeting time changes. 1600UTC, biweekly, Thursdays... 
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Geodata_Committee_Meeting_20060420
http://logs.qgis.org/osgeo/%23osgeo.2006-04-20.log 

The main subject of discussion this week, and on the list, has been
data packaging needs, and how what's been discussed among the Geodata
group complements what the Education Committee are sketching out in
terms of their needs. The two groups intersect a lot in terms of goals
and participants; the initial consensus is they are best kept as distinct, 
but closely co-operating activities.

http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Education_Working_Groups#Data_Package_Group
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Geodata_Packaging_Working_Group

There's a need both for global coverage, and local coverage data sets. 
In a tutorial situation, downloadable packages are as necessary as
availability over online services using OGC standards. One promising
path to explore is generating packages from online services on-demand.
A function of OSGeo in this would be to vouch for data quality and
currency; thus the importance of getting metadata in place, to be able
to track changes and point back to the original distributors; there
was a long conversation about this after the meeting. (see logs) 

Tyler kindly wrote up a description of a tutorial data package based
on his Mapserver workshop experiences, and this provides a good goal
state to aim towards. 
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Edu_Data_Package
Markus and Helena have also been putting together a wishlist for local
coverage tutorial data, which will likely have to be in the US, due to 
lack of open access to public geodata in the rest of the world. 

Once there's a base system at telascience available for processing
large data sets, the plan is to provide three basic data sets via OGC
interfaces - Blue Marble NG, SRTM and VMap0. This will depend on some
elements of the http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Software_Stack being
available, and providing a simple - commandline if necessary - way to
generate metadata for what's being stored and published. 
Norm Vine is volunteering to handle the setup work, partly to help 
ensure that what's used as demo installations really is 
non-project-developer-installable.  

By the next fortnightly meeting - Thursday May 4th, 1600UTC - I hope 
we'll have a lot of the pieces in place for at least one running service. 

(In the interest of broader communications, I'm ccing this to the
discuss list and also going to paste it into the new and still somewhat
experimental 'RSS feeds of annoucements' facility on CollabNet)

thanks,


jo