NDSA:Geo November 2012

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November 8, 2012 Meeting Notes

Participants

Tim Baker, James Watson, Steve Morris, Bob Downs, Wayne Graham, Glen McAninch, Mark Myers, Steve Morris, Bob Nutsch, Alec Bethune, Curt Pulford, Dean Farrell, Julie Sweetkind-Singer, Jaime Soltenburg, Keith Kaneda, Erin Engle, Markus Wust, others.

Neatline presentation:

Scholars’ Lab had huge backlog of GIS data that needed to be made accessible. Had bunch of CDs with data on them, had to find the right person with knowledge in order to figure out what was on the CDs. Decided to build a portal built on open source tools to

Geoserver (http://geoserver.org/display/GEOS/Welcome) Geonetwork (to maintain metadata) (http://geonetwork-opensource.org/) Postgis (for raster data, geotiffs processed through the system) (http://postgis.refractions.net/) OpenGeoportal.org

How can Scholars’ Lab build on what libraries and other cultural heritage organizations are doing and use our geo-infrastructure in an interesting way? This lead them to develop Neatline. In the beginning, Neatline was a stand-alone Java container. You’d feed some XML to it and it would create a timeline.

Quickly gravitated to doing something else to the backend. Didn’t want to authenticate users or manage items. Leveraged Omeka so could focus on the parts of the infrastructure that were interesting to us, the maps and timelines. LC project to sustain open source software, working with Center for History and New Media.

Neatline demo and discussion of Scholars’ Lab geospatial infrastructure.

Questions:

How about rubbersheeting maps? In order to put historic maps in Neatline.

Blog post about doing it in Neatline: www.scholarslab.org/geospatial-and-temporal/using-neatline-with-historical-maps-georeferencing

Should take about 20-30 minutes to figure out how to georeference a map.