Geodata Data Collection Project

[Christopher Schmidt]

As Jo mentioned earlier today in her summary email, I've taken a project
lead role on getting a data uploading interface put together as a first
cut. My goal in this is to help figure out what skills everyone might
have and be able to contribute to the project as far as Software
Development goes.

I've gotten SVN commit access from Jo to help manage getting anyone who
wants to contribute code started as quickly as possible, and jo said:

15:28:18 < zool> i'd be very happy to offer you whatever CN role it is
that would give you, and others who want to help, adequate commit rights

So, if you have an interest in helping form an uploading interface for
data + Metadata, either frontend or backend, or want to work on the
catalog frontend to the data that's being uploaded, or just want to
advise that we should use lots of lime green text on bright pink
background, feel free to bring interests, concerns, offers of help to
the list, and I'll try to coordinate into something useful :)

My first goal is to get a simple-as-possible interface requesting the
data we need from people to upload data, with the interest of
establishing a base set of data on top of which catalogs/etc. can be
built -- until there's some data to visualize, trying to build
visualizations of it is not going to be trivial :)

To that end, I've created a new directory in subversion: 

  https://geodata.osgeo.org/source/browse/geodata/trunk/uploader/

Right now, you'll see:
  metardf2html: Attempt to convert RDF into HTML form for entering
                metadata.
                
The idea behind this is to use the OWL document at:

https://geodata.osgeo.org/source/browse/*checkout*/geodata/trunk/metadata/geometadata.rdf?content-type=text%2Fplain&rev=5

as a datasource for which we can build a frontend programatically, which
will allow us to modify our data input forms as our target model changes
in the future. (Hopefully.) The idea is then to store this into a
database similarly built from the RDF data model, somehow connecting the
two with a web page ;)

If other people are interested in helping code, offering design advice,
or anything else, I'd be very grateful -- for example, one thing that
would be useful to me would be to have a visualization (SVG, HTML,
whatever) that shows what people would like any interface to look like.

I'm currently working in Python, and plan to do so until someone offers
assistance in some other language ;) I can write PHP and Perl, but I
think for maintainability sake (see goal #5 as earlier defined) Python
code will be easiest to read, unless someone wants to convince me
otherwise.

It may be that after spending a half dozen hours on this, someone comes
along and says "We should just use this existing geodata storage
framework instead." If there is such a thing that people think we should
be working from as a starting point, now would be a great time to
mention it -- whether it's pulling in code, pulling in interface, or
pulling in ideas for what such a tool needs to have.

If I've said anything terribly wrong, say so now! If you have any ideas,
share them now! If you want any kind of participation, absolutely let me
know, and we can work together to do whatever you have an interest in
doing.

Looking forward to any and all collaboration,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer