Second Geodata Committee meeting, description thereof

[Jo Walsh]

dear all,

Thanks for attending the meeting yesterday (29th March). Two hours
flashed by, somehow; I hope those who attended, found it stimulating.
Logs are here: http://logs.qgis.org/osgeo/%23osgeo.2006-03-29.log
And overview with attached minutes (thanks Schuyler for annotating):
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Geodata_Committee_Meeting_20060329

Two hours flashed by, somehow. The biggest discussion thread was on
the idea of a data + metadata repository, which telascience is
generously offering to provide hosting for. My attempt to summarise
this seemed better placed on the wiki. 
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Geodata_Repository

This is an effort to bring together an ideal spec, a "discussion draft" 
that can both be offered to John Graham at UCSD as a description of
what to expect; to address Norm Vine's considerations about having
high-quality metadata as an integral part of a data repository and
come up with a baseline spec for what metadata is needed and useful; 
to figure out how this will directly support interests in
search/discovery and repackaging of data; what "differentiates" this
from repositories like seamless.gov or indexes like mapdex.org .

We had an unfortunate timing clash with the #foss4g2006 meeting,
partly due to Daylight Savings Time kicking in in Europe before it
does in the US, but if we move the geodata meeting time any earlier 
that 1500UTC, it becomes painful for those people in Pacific time. 

FOSS4G looks as if it will be even more exciting than last year's Open
Source Geospatial / Mapserver User Meeting in Minneapolis, and that
was a pretty amazing event. http://www.foss4g2006.org/ 

There's a goodish pile of "meta level" questions about being a
Committee and what happens in it, brought up by a couple of IRC
suggestions that got punted on, that i would like to work through in 
another email.

thanks,


jo