[Geodata] Rebooting this committee

pcreso at pcreso.com pcreso at pcreso.com
Mon Jul 30 10:32:15 PDT 2012


The data licence issue is a hot one for me & my organisation.

Given the wide interest & use of CC3 for data, despite some wide held concerns, & the intent by CC to make the forthcoming CC4 more "data friendly", is there a role for OSGEO to have input into the CC4 development process from a geodata perspective?

Is anyone else interested?


Cheers,

   Brent Wood

--- On Tue, 7/31/12, David William Bitner <bitner at gyttja.org> wrote:

From: David William Bitner <bitner at gyttja.org>
Subject: Re: [Geodata] Rebooting this committee
To: "Seven (aka Arnulf)" <seven at arnulf.us>
Cc: geodata at lists.osgeo.org
Date: Tuesday, July 31, 2012, 2:17 AM





0. Whatever already works in this committee should not be interrupted by

these new ideas. There has been considerable work on creating vector and

data repositories and services. I am widely ignorant of what the status

of these activities is.

Speaking as the Chair of this mostly dormant committee, "Whatever already works" is nothing that you need to worry about. Early on in this committee we made a number of false starts to try to build metadata and data repositories on the Telascience resources and each attempt quickly went nowhere. The difficult thing with geodata is that it gets stale very fast and it takes a *lot* of work to build and maintain. 

 


1. My suggestion is to also use this committee as a hub to build

knowledge around licenses, maintain a repository of initiatives and link

everything together. Not so much like hard metadata in a catalog but a

lot looser, more like a big bucket with goodies to find.

Acting as a hub of knowledge around licenses is something that would be extremely valuable for this group and something that should be reasonable to work on.


"Link everything together" seems like an invitation to become stale and irrelevant again very fast. I do agree in creating the linkages, but we need to make sure that it is done in a way that recognizes it will never be comprehensive.

 


1.a Reach out: Maybe there is no reason to do this here at all. There

are many others who care for open geospatial data in many different

facets, be it more from the methodological side like  in OKFN

(http://okfn.org/) hands-on like in OpenStreetMap

(http://openstreetmap.org) or metadata-focused as in CKAN

(http://thedatahub.org/).



You will all have contacts and insights into these and other

communities. Share your thoughts. If we then still believe that we

should do something "separate" here, then my first proposal would be to:



2. Rename "Public Geospatial Data Committee" to "Geodata". It is the

shortest and broadest we can get at the same time. And we will make sure

that we do not lose "public" and "open".

This has functionally been what we have done since the inception of this committee. I do not believe that we need to drop the more formal full name, but that it is accepted to commonly use the shorthand of "Geodata Committee".


 


3. I would like to start work on a White paper explaining the different

aspects of Openness when it comes to geospatial data - er - geodata.

Wonderful! I would love to help.




4. Maintain a collection of Open Data initiatives around the world,

public, private and community driven. Just list them, compare them, make

them a searchable resource for those still looking for ways to do it

"right".
I think this is a great idea, but one that we need to make sure that there are enough people to curate and maintain this list such that it can become something people can count on. This cannot be successful as an initiative by one person, this needs to be community driven.



I am excited to see renewed interest in this committee. As I have tried to point out periodically, I am happy to continue in my role as Chair of this group in facilitating whatever efforts that there is time and energy to work on. I do not, however, necessarily have the energy to really seek out and drive new initiatives (as evidenced by the overall silence of this group the last few years). If there is anyone who really has that drive, I am very happy to pass on the baton -- please let me know.


Cheers,
David

-----Inline Attachment Follows-----

_______________________________________________
Geodata mailing list
Geodata at lists.osgeo.org
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/geodata
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/geodata/attachments/20120730/e9d6d65e/attachment-0001.html>


More information about the Geodata mailing list