Geodata Meeting Minutes/summary...

[Jo Walsh]

dear all,

Today's meeting was low-key but productive, I thought. :)

Logs are here: http://logs.qgis.org/osgeo/%23osgeo.2006-07-20.log
Summary is here:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Geodata_Committee_Seventh_Meeting#Minutes

Or just here:

Due to the hard work of Howard Butler and John Graham we now have
hardware at telascience whose very high bandwidth we can make use of
for establishing a [[Geodata Repository]], one of the core elements of
the Geodata Committees's mission. See also [[SAC Service Status]]

Chris Schmidt has kindly volunteered to be a coordinator for this
effort - getting software set up and helping others to install what
they need. Chris is thinking about the interface for exploring and
discovering geodata. The repository will also act as a showcase for
the web-facing parts of the OSGeo+related software stack - Mapserver,
Geoserver and OpenLayers in particular.
(Although none of these are "official" OSGeo projects).

Chris outlined his sense of requirements: "We outlined requirements:
1: Works, 2. Is easy, 3. Stores Metadata, 4. Stores files, 5. Can be
fixed by someone if I get hit by a bus". Those people wishing to help
with this admirable effort are asked to contact Howard Butler about
being added to the LDAP database which will grant them shell access to
the telascience systems. 

http://geodata.telascience.org/ is now pointing to the system we have
to provide hosted services on. Jo will also direct CN to point
http://dev.geodata.osgeo.org/ at this host. (I'd like to have
find.geodata.osgeo.org pointing here too.)

[[Geodata Metadata Requirements]] have been described at previous
geodata meetings. This is an effort to balance between FGDC metadata
compliance, and a level of detail which won't put people off. Jo's
implementation of this (in progress) can be
[https://geodata.osgeo.org/source/browse/geodata/trunk/metadata/
browsed at the Geodata Committee  subversion repository]

Further discussion of data licensing is postponed for now; we agree to
focus on public domain data sources, and worry about more complex
licensing issues when they arise. (There are some unresolved issues
re. ESRI's non-commercial use copyright of elements of VMap0; we are
trying to get a more definite word out of the ESRI/NGA about this).

An important part of what the committee can do is to network efforts,
both by OSGeo members and others, who are working in this problem
space - providing 'safe space' for people who are taking an
implementation driven approach to repository/discovery to talk.

Chris Holmes brought up the question of to what extent OSGeo can offer
a republishing / tiling service for datasets being maintained by
members: "OSGeo could point ka-map/squid/custom caching at their WMS,
and point clients at their tiles.". This would fit well with
telascience's goals. We need a minimal "catalog" for this (Jo is
planning on building this onto the metadata store, using OWSlib).

We plan to have a neat service to demo and publicise by FOSS4G
(mid-September); with a service in place in basic form by mid-August,
including as much as possible of the following:

* Upload tools for people to upload data in the form of files
* Annotation of those uploads as they happen so we know what the tdata is
* Browsing of the uploaded data in some way that is useful
* Hopefully some tools which work against the uploaded data to display
  it in a more useful way -- which starts heading towards the earlier
  described Utopia