NDSA:Geospatial

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The NDSA Geospatial Content Team

Scope

The Geospatial Content Team is interested in exploring challenges and solutions to the long-term preservation, stewardship and accessibility of digital mapping information.

NDSA:Draft Mission Statement

Team Facilitators

• Brett Abrams

Meetings

The NDSA Geospatial Content team calls are held the 3rd Friday of each month at 11:00 a.m. ET.

Next call is scheduled for Friday March 21, 2014 at 11:00 a.m. ET: Wade Bishop, an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Sciences at U. of Tennessee, Knoxville will talk about his research on the Geoweb. A copy of his article, "Digital Curation and the GeoWeb: An Emerging Role for Geographic Information Librarians" from the Journal of Map & Geography Libraries can be found here.

Friday April 18: John Faundeen of the EROS Data Center will give a presentation on the NDSA Levels of Preservation activity and USGS' efforts at implementation.

Meeting Minutes

Geo February 2014-Presentation from Glen McAninch of KDLA about their method for linking record series to electronic system descriptions for the purpose of facilitating records management within electronic systems(see advance notes here). Recording of presentation available shortly.

Geo January 2014-Discussion on the Geospatial Data Stewardship: Key Online Resources document

NDSA:Geo December 2013

Geo October and November 2013 meetings cancelled.

NDSA:Geo September 2013

NDSA:Geo August 2013

NDSA:Geo July 2013

NDSA:Geo June 2013

NDSA:Geo May 2013

April 2013

No call held in March 2013

NDSA:Geo February 2013

NDSA:Geo January 2013

NDSA:Geo December 2012

NDSA:Geo November 2012

NDSA:Geo October 2012

NDSA:Geo August 2012

No call held in July 2012

NDSA:Geo June 2012

NDSA:Geo May 2012

NDSA:April 2012

No call held in March 2012

NDSA:February 2012

Current Activities

Industry Outreach:

Archives and Libraries act in conjunction with geospatial users in government to meet with ESRI and discuss need for published or open formats.

Appraisal:

Continuing to explore the appraisal issues around geospatial data for long-term preservation.

Have completed the reworking the "Appraisal and Selection of Geospatial Data" white paper prepared by Steve Morris for the Library of Congress in February 2011. The paper has been reviewed for comment by the full NDSA Content WG and will be shared with the NDSA Coordination Group for final review in late July with a public release planned in Sept. 2013. Latest version (version 6).

The group will continue to leverage work being done by the FGDC Users/Historical Data Working Group. The group is reviewing the U/HDWG paper on "Guidance on the Selection and Appraisal of Geospatial Content of Enduring Value" which is currently under review by the FGDC Coordination Group. As a future action, the group may adapt this FGDC report and recast it as an NDSA report.

The group will continue to build on GeoMAPP appraisal efforts.

Collection Development Policies/Records Acquisition Policies/Records Retention Policies:

Members will share their policy documents with the group for comparison purposes. One possible outcome could be an NDSA "standard" collection policy document template and an NDSA "standard" records acquistion template (if different?).

Spatial Data Infrastructure:

Leverage SDI activities happening at all levels of government to benefit the long-term preservation of geospatial information of value to the nation. From the FGDC web site:

"Consistent means to share geographic data among all users could produce significant savings for data collection and use and enhance decision making. Executive Order 12906calls for the establishment of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure defined as the technologies, policies, and people necessary to promote sharing of geospatial data throughout all levels of government, the private and non-profit sectors, and the academic community.

The goal of this Infrastructure is to reduce duplication of effort among agencies, improve quality and reduce costs related to geographic information, to make geographic data more accessible to the public, to increase the benefits of using available data, and to establish key partnerships with states, counties, cities, tribal nations, academia and the private sector to increase data availability."

Proprietary vs. open formats:

Discuss the challenges and opportunities with dealing with different formats. Prepare case studies on format issues or on particular formats. Address "emerging" "current" and "waning" formats. Explore format "openness" (For background information reference blog posts here and the perspective of the new Esri DC Development Center here). Build on GeoMAPP format work and Library of Congress Sustainability of Digital Formats work.

Rights and Access:

Explore copyright and other rights issues that challenge the access to and preservation of Geospatial Data: (a) copyright, licensing and legal implications of language such as indemnification/hold harmless clauses in data distribution agreements; (b) administrative metadata for dealing with access rights (c) Costs/fees for obtaining local public geospatial data and implications for archiving (i.e. continually purchase new versions based on retention schedule?)

Technical Best Practices

Work to Compose and Disseminate Technical Best Practices for geospatial preservation: (a)File formats, naming conventions and best practices; (b) Export feature classes out of geodatabases and archive as shapefiles?; (c) re-name files for archiving purposes, but retain link (via database?) back to original file from original data producer? (d) share organizational workflow demonstrations with the group.

Explore the possibility of a future geospatial preservation Wikipedia article. Some of the work the group did when considering the FGDC Geospatial Platform may be relevant (content, limitations, risks, etc.). See also http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2014/01/wikipedia-the-go-to-source-for-information-about-digital-preservation/

Metadata:

Document ISO standards, preservation standards, preservation-based metadata formats as they relate to long-term stewardship. Actively participate in standardization activities through OGC, ISO, FGDC and organizations such as ASPRS etc.

State GIS Clearinghouse Issues:

Continue to explore the role of state GIS Clearinghouses and their relationship with local data providers and the details regarding the data transfer between the two: (a) acquisition of data (by the clearinghouse) on specific schedules; (b) data sharing agreements between the two entities; (c) definition of framework layers and those preserved vs. not preserved (appraisal process) in an eventual archive; (d) metadata and minimum documentation required by both clearinghouse and archive

At-Risk Data Issues:

Explore challenges related to Orphan works and leverage existing efforts such as the IEEE Group on Earth Observations Purge Alerts and the ICSU/CODATA Data at Risk Inventory to identify stewards for at-risk and endangered data.

• • Coordination Challenges
  • Capacity Challenges
  • Organizational/Resource Challenges: use as structure for case studies
    • Records Retention Approach
    • Collections Development Approach
  • Orphaned Works Challenges

• • Organizational/Resource Challenges: use as structure for case studies
    • Records Retention Approach (NARA, North Carolina, Kentucky)
    • Collections Development Approach (Montana, Wisconsin, university libraries)

Goal is to use the descriptions of how these organizational approaches work to show their pluses and minuses in terms of identifying geospatial data and bringing that data into the repository for long-term preservation and access. This approach will enable other organizations to recognize the approach that they use and see their own strengths and weaknesses.

Appears that we have an A1 and A2 approach to the scheduling method as Kentucky's approach is not the same as NARA nor North Carolina.

FGDC may have a CAP Grant for Geo-archiving Business plan development which could be used to accomplish this goal.

Completed Activities

NDSA:geopreservation.org Sustainability Review

Speakers Series

Invite industry representatives to discuss their products and their engagement with long-term stewardship issues:

• Generally speaking, vendors in the Geo space
• Safe Software and their FME tool (http://www.safe.com/fme/fme-technology/)
• Ray Caputo on GeoPDF efforts
• Archivematica (are they doing special work with geospatial data?)
• ESRI to talk about their perspective on facilitating geoarchiving (Andrew Turner)
• Mapbox data publishing platform (https://www.mapbox.com/about/)
• Mikel Maron (geopreservation w/OpenStreetMap)Listserv a https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/historic
• Openstreetmap generally (http://www.openstreetmap.org)
• Open Geospatial Consortium preservation people (David Arctur used to be engaged but may have a new job. Who is the current Director of Interoperability programs?
• Karl Grossner (karlg@stanford.edu) & Kathy Weimer (k-weimer@library.tamu.edu) on their efforts to start an ADHO GeoHumanities SIG
• Opengeoportal http://opengeoportal.org/(Patrick Florance at Tufts) (Patrick.Florance@tufts.edu)
• Preservica http://preservica.com/ (Mark Evans, Mark.Evans@tessella.com)
• GeoHydra: Geospatial MetaData ToolKit for use in a GeoHydra head. Darren Hardy (drh@stanford.edu)Digital Library Systems and Services, Stanford University Libraries or Beth Sadler at Stanford doing Slr Blacklight.
• An intro to the DC Historical Society map collection and the MapStory Warper (http://www.meetup.com/mapstorydc/events/153856492/)
• Angela Lee, ESRI (talk about the data being archived on GeoPOrtal?)
• Martin from ESRI (technology of geodatabase)
• Adobe geospatial folks (need to identify contacts)
• Spatialite
• Safe Software (president Don Murray?)
• LizardTech (Butch has contact, Ryan Burley, regional manager)
• Terrago

Potential Future Meeting Topics

• Archives & Libraries need to meet with industry to discuss need for published or open formats
• Find location for geospatial data an entity desires to purge (see CEOS Purge Alert system at http://wgiss.ceos.org/purgealert/)
• Appraisal - what data needs to be preserved (we all have thoughts on this topic)
• Understanding state GIS Clearinghouse relationship w/local providers and transfers
• Electronic records management
• Archiving GIS data/metadata
• FGDC to ISO 19115 NAP impacts
• Storage & Access Infrastructure
• USGS experience with the NARA Affiliated Archives/Affiliated Relationship Program
• NARA Electronics Records Archive (ERA) and geospatial records

Team Members

Listserv now happening at NDSA-GEO@LIST.DIGITALPRESERVATION.GOV The list archives are at http://list.digitalpreservation.gov/archives/NDSA-GEO.html

We also maintain a spreadsheet of participants with contact information, but this is updated less frequently.

We formerly used a Google Group to facilitate electronic communication and to track members but the group has been deleted.

Draft Definition of At-Risk Geospatial Content

The geospatial content group has defined at-risk data as that which they take in, collect and/or maintain based on an established collecting policy, schedule, or agreed upon appraisal decisions, recognizing overlap between federal, state and local government

We define "data at risk" in this context as scientific data which are not in a format that permits full electronic access to the information which they contain. Such data may be inherently non-digital (e.g. handwritten or photographic), on near-obsolete digital media (such as magnetic tapes) or insufficiently described (lacking meta-data). Some born-digital data can also be considered "at risk" if they cannot be ingested into managed databases because they lack adequate formatting or metadata. Data which are regarded as unuseable tend to be regarded as useless, and then risk being destroyed. Most of the non-electronic data in question pre-date the digital era, and where they complement more modern ones by offering a much longer time-base they are essential, sometimes vital, for studies of long-term trends