[Geodata] ISO 19115:2003 North American Profile (Metadata)

[Jo Walsh]

dear bitner, all,
On Fri, Feb 09, 2007 at 10:08:26AM -0600, David William Bitner wrote:
> The North American Profile for Metadata is in review process right now (
> http://www.fgdc.gov/standards/projects/incits-l1-standards-projects/NAP-Metadata/NAP_Metadata

> Do we want to submit any comments as a group?

sight unseen, I'm very interested in this.
It must be metadata consultation week, because a request for comments
on the European geospatial metadata draft profile came out recently.
http://www.ec-gis.org/inspire/whatsnew.cfm#1590

This will have gone, i hope to Markus' Spatial Data Interest Cgroup,
and that's a vector through which the open source GIS community could
make a response, and i would like to help make one.

My plan looks like: printing this out, reading it while on long travel
jags, writing a pile of notes & pointers to key passages, emailing them 
to a wiki page, and trying to muster an OSGeo response on that basis. 

I'd be interested in trying to do the same for the North American
process - to look at both at once and if there are discrepancies /
incompatibilities then making sure the world knows and resolution there.

I think the tone and context of such a response would come better from
a North American person too (does the scope of the metadata draft you
point at also cover canada and the CGDI?). And that it would be worth
talking with the contents of the geodatacommons mailing list -
http://geodatacommons.umaine.edu/ - to see if they also have some time
and interest, but not enough to do their own response, but might join in.

their interesting whitepapers include one on metadata which had some
sound statements to make: 
http://geodatacommons.umaine.edu/about.php?about=wpapers 
i found i agreed completely or disagreed completely with their stuff.
i think there's way too much emphasis on taxonomy generally, and not
on indirect means of sorting and correlation. Against Classification... 


zx