NDSA:Geo August 2013

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August 16, 2013 Meeting Notes

Participants

Not captured.

Meeting Notes

The call featured a presentation from Diane Papineau of the state of Montana who is heading to the URISA conference. She shared her slides for the conference for comment.

That lead into a discussion on ways for the NDSA and wider geospatial preservation community to engage with the Geospatial Platform activity, following on the June 2013 call featuring Jerry Johnston, the GIO from the Dept. of Interior, and the Geo subgroup call in July where we discussed the issue further. Diane's slides from the July meeting are available here.

The slides and the discussion that came out of them lead to the composing of a white paper on Platform engagement.

There was a lively discussion on the opportunities but also questions on what role the NDSA Geospatial Content group would play in such an engagement. Some of the questions brought up included:

• Use overload if “one central place” is used.
• Dependent on third party tools? (Drupel and ESRI ArcGIS online for map gallery?)
• What is the federal government commitment to this tool/website over time? Say, 50 years from now?
• What’s the commitment from the feds to migrate content as web technology/tools advance?
• DOI makes the platform (sandbox) and rules, sets expectations, service level agreements details, etc. They create Drupel templates (open source content management system) but then hand the keys over. Hand accounts to that community (we would have control—a plus). However, seems like someone or some organization would still have to be the administrator
• Who or which group would own this community? Ensure it’s relevance, currentness? Jerry (DOI) is heard saying in the webinar something to the effect: ‘Later, the community name can be searched on “we just need to get the community stewards to do it”
• Seems to be a focus on federal or nation-wide data, maps, etc. Something to consider since archiving happens at the state, institution, and perhaps local level

Finally, a brief update on the status of the “Appraisal and Selection of Geospatial Data” document. It will be run by the NDSA Coordination Committee with final disposition of comments on their regular September conference call. If all goes well the document should be ready for release in the second half of Sept. 2013.

Action Items

Diane and Butch will put together a prose document based on some of the questions posed in Diane's regarding potential NDSA Geospatial Content subgroup engagement with the Geospatial Platform.