Geospatial Interest Group (GIG) 18 Oct 2006

Standards exist already, want to talk about applicability and interoperability, not reinvent

Charter - everyone satisfied with it, Reed will do minor edits. Exec comm approves

Task Groups

Geographic Standards Task group

• for authority standard, areas, how they relate, how you use them
• need to revisit
• need for marine as well as terrestrial
• Tasks
  • 2 main issues: data exchange vs controlled vocabulary (content)
  • OGC applicability statements
  • Domain ontology with controlled vocab, geographic taxonomy
  • 1st task is to review existing standards
    • iso standards, fips standards, create a dataset, floristic units
  • app document
  • pay someone? there is a budget, could do proposal for meetings or contract work
• need to put together charter and timeline, send to Exec comm
  • Chris Frazier will do
• TDWG, OGC MOU
  • TDWG has associate membership in OGC, OGC has institutional membership in TDWG
  • TDWG exec can appoint up to 3 people to interact with OGC. Would prefer not to rotate them much. Interested? Talk to Reed, Walter or Lee Belbin.
  • Some opportunity for funding. Fill out meeting template to maintain some continuity.
  • OGC and ISO are tightly coupled - 2 sep bodies but have MOU

BioGeo Interoperability Task group

• Javier - interoperability testbed, workflow
• Lots of biodiversity data available, but nobody providing interoperability
• dist maps even worse
• OGC providing good infrastructure, but not enough (apps can communicate)
  • but not enough about naming columns, etc, only spatial part understandable
  • other communities are doing this with OGC
• everything implemented in diff structures, need to do in OGC way, GML
• dist maps, specimen locations, dist modeling/ raster data, itineraries(?)
• framework for information and analysis, services can understand info, consume, analyze
• Create Task group for this problem
  • frame this in Applicability Statement - how to use these together, need cookbook
  • workflow - identify who is doing what, Javier wants to produce OGC standard models
  • look at OGC site for examples of other domains doing what we want to do in biodiversity informatics

Conceptual Model Task Group

• could be differences b/w OGC and TDWG models
• conceptual model - potential task group, but maybe better in TAG
• Observations and Measurements Spec (O&M Spec)
• developed in OWS initiatives
• feature type is an event, get a result on an observation on a thing
• Feature of Interest (FOI)
• need a conceptual model to talk about diff representations of same type of date (ie. darwincore + abcd)
• conceptual model of taxonomic data -- (used to create) --> representational view of darwincore

Old Geography subgroup

• Should be subsumed by GIG? Neil and Raphael (Kew?) may like to continue, but could be a task group within GIG
• TDWG Geographic Standard - decision: adopt into GIG for maintenance with task group
  • who is using it?
    • 7000 downloads in past 5 years
  • someone needs to maintain the standard, but decision needs to come from those involved or exec comm. Or we (GIG) could take it on
  • where is the standard?
    • Kew people will ask Neil to upload it.
  • what is the standard
    • focused on botany,
    • paper version, but shapefiles too