Geodata @ FOSS4G

[Auke Jilderda]

Hi Jo,

these items would make excellent articles to put into spotlights on the
front page of the OSGeo.org site.  Would you be ok with that?

Web committee, if you agree, I can easily convert these into snippets
with the proper HTML tags and publish them onto the front page?


Auke

On 18 September 2006 10:48, Jo Walsh wrote:
> 
> dear all, here's my attempt to summarise some of the activity at
> FOSS4G in terms of the geodata committee's mission statement. 
> I had a great time last week, it was good to connect with so many.
> 
> Licensing
> ---------
> In France, David Jonglez and camptocamp are heavily 
> socialising the Public
> Geodata License at local government level. It will help a lot to get
> the PGL license to v1.0, debug the English translation and encourage
> more translations. I am on at least one PGL-interest mailing list and
> I bet there are more. It would be good to merge them and try to have
> short summary translations of traffic. OpenStreetmap legal-talk would
> also be a good place to consult on this. It would be of benefit to
> have a good namespace for the PGL, I would happily offer
> http://publicgeodata.org/license/ or http://pgl.geodata.osgeo.org/ or
> anything along those lines.
> http://sig.cwriter.org/index.php/PGL
> http://cemml.carleton.ca:8080/OGUG/pgl
> 
> Repository
> ----------
> There is a lot of interest in having a "safe pair of hands" for
> public geodata, especially among people doing NGO/'development' work,
> and academic projects across Europe. Getting the licensing right up
> front is an important element of this. There is way more interest than
> OSGeo is set up to handle immediately. For social technical and
> political reasons people are going to want more local mirrors. Working
> to put together a blueprint and best practise for an open source data
> archive/library and search system, and then trying to persuade
> different institutions to run one, is going to be fun. OpenSDI
> connects here - isn't "SDI" a bit like "Web 2.0"? ;) and the imminent
> incubation of FAO GeoNetwork as an OSGeo project is an exciting
> development...
> 
> Metadata/Discovery
> ------------------
> A short but super constructive BOF on metadata models and
> catalog interfaces felt promising and work/discussion about this will
> continue on the OSGeo geodata mailing list. Thanks Stefan Keller and
> Tom Kralidis for organising the get-together. Developments on a
> "simplest, least useless thing" model that is neutral of interface and
> format and can be translated between them should progress over the
> next few months.
> 
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Simple_Catalog_Interface#Notes
> _from_Metadata_.2B_Catalog_BOF_at_FOSS4G2006 
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Geodata_Metadata_Requirements
> 
> Policy
> ------
> The proposed INSPIRE directive establishing a spatial data
> infrastructure in Europe is in a behind-closed-doors phase and could
> go either way; either greatly opening the public's right at least to
> discover and to "view" public geographic information free of cost; or
> it could exempt state-collected geodata even from inclusion in
> metadata catalogues if collecting/brokering agencies hold
> "intellectual property rights" in that data. 
> There should be a lot of opportunities for open source geospatial
> projects with a strong standards orientation to rapid prototype for
> INSPIRE's "implementing rules", given a sane directive passes. 
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/FOSS4G_Public_Geodata_BOF
> 
> 
> cheers,
> 
> 
> jo