IRC meeting coments

[Ned Horning]

All,

I enjoyed lurking on the IRC meeting today. It will take some time for me to
get into that mode of communicating so I decided to put some after-thoughts
into an e-mail. 

It's still not entirely clear to me what the initial objective is for
hosting data but if it is simply to illustrate what can be done it doesn't
make much difference what datasets are hosted at this point. The focus
should probably be on getting something up and running and figuring out what
capabilities are most useful and doable. For example, is it reasonable to
allow users to select subsets of vector and raster data? What about letting
the user select from an array of data formats? What kinds of search
capabilities are most useful? Think from the perspective of a user who is
not very tech savvy. Will our effort improve on the data browsing options
that are out there?

For metadata I don't see much value in creating a new standard. One
advantage of using FGDC or a subset of it is that most of the data that is
freely distributed probably already has FGDC format metadata associated with
it. What ever is decided for a metadata format it should at least be
compatible with an existing system so it's easy to map fields between
systems. I'm not sure if FGDC will be a barrier to new contributions. Do we
expect to be generating large amounts of new metadata?  

I also wanted to let folks know about an initiative in the conservation
community that is along the lines of what it seems we are trying to do. It's
a Conservation GeoPortal
(http://conserveonline.org/workspaces/cons.geo.portal) and they are mulling
over some of the same issues we are. I have encouraged the lead on this
project, Frank Biasi, to join this group as I expect he will have a lot to
add. 

All the best, 

Ned

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