[Geodata] Rebooting this committee

[David William Bitner]

>
>
>
> 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
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