Action items.
Action 1: Please contact Ivan (ideloatch@fgdc.gov) if you would like to participate in the Future Directions effort.
Action 2: Please get in contact with your Webmaster and let Bruce McKenzie (bmckenzi@fgdc.gov) know if they want additional links with your agency’s information added to the FGDC Geographic Information Resource.
Action 3: Bruce McKenzie will let the Coordination Group members know which of their agency links have been loaded in the FGDC Geographic Information Resource, so they can ensure that he is notified when those links change.
Action 4: Julie Binder Maitra will continue to rework the language on Section G and Section VI and will move the policy forward by electronic ballot before the next meeting.
Host: Donald Draper Campbell, FCC
Attendees:
Ivan DeLoatch, FGDC
Alison Kiernan, FGDC
Frederick R. Broome, Census
Richard Pearsall, USGS/Mapping
Wendy Blake-Coleman, EPA
Julie Binder Maitra, FGDC
David Morehouse, DOE
Myra Bambacus, NASA
Hedy Rossmeissl, USGS/DOI
Nancy Blyler, USACE
Lee R. Warren, NIMA
Sharon Shin, FGDC
Milo Robinson, FGDC
Billy Tolar, USGS/National Atlas
Theodore Hull, NARA
Chris Clarke, NRCS
Betsy Banas, USFS
David Beddoe, IBM
George Percivall, NASA/GST
Bruce McKenzie, FGDC
Salvatore Sclafani, HUD
Shawn Silkensen, LMCO – NCITS/L1
Lornell Parks, Census
Mario Lopez-Gomez, DOJ/Civil Rights
Mark Bradford, BTS/USDOT
Brad Beach, NIMA
Fred Miller, GSA
Kevin Lange, NIMA
K. Thirmulai, USDOT
Jochen Albrecht, UCGIS
Scott McAfee, FEMA/DHS
Sam Bacharach – OGC
June 6 Steering Committee Meeting – Ivan DeLoatch, FGDC
The FGDC Steering Committee meeting will focus on the Geospatial One-Stop (GOS). There is a GOS Board of Directors meeting tomorrow to demonstrate both portal approaches.
Chris Clarke has been key in moving the Standards process along. Content standards for the GOS will be in shape by September. Modules 2 and 3 have been completed and now need to be populated with agency data regarding existing geospatial data and planned data acquisitions. The agencies will benefit in doing this for their own business needs.
The Steering Committee meeting will feature a presentation by Sue Kalweit on the overall geospatial activities of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – focusing on moving quickly to organize the Geospatial Management Office over the next 6 to 9 months using an enterprise approach. Ivan will present the NSDI Future Directions effort and will feature possible next steps to help the FGDC do things better externally and internally. The FGDC will form a planning team and will work with CEG and a professional facilitator to help develop a future directions plan with timelines, objectives and projects.
Action 1: Please contact Ivan (ideloatch@fgdc.gov) if you would like to participate in the Future Directions effort.
Hank Garie and Scott Cameron will present on the Geospatial One-Stop portal effort. Milo and Jason Freihage will also present on the Geospatial Investments Review that will look at budgets across all agencies to determine common activities.
FGDC Geographic Information Resource - Bruce McKenzie, FGDC
The FGDC Geographic Information Resource is available on the FGDC website at http://www.fgdc.gov/apps/glist.new/index.php. This resource has been in the works for a year and a half and serves as a catalogue with easy to use searches on grants, organizations, progress/activities, software, etc. The purpose of this search tool is to provide more extensive information about, and access to, Federal and non-Federal government programs and activities. This is not a “one stop shop” for data; rather it is a resource that links information together. Bruce worked with Doug Caldwell at USACE to create this web resource. There are 3 ways to search: by organization name, by ‘type of information’, and by keyword(s). The resource consists of 1119 websites, approximately 11,000 URLs, and 9096 documents. We would like your help in maintaining this resource. This is a governmental resource – we don’t list private sector grants.
Action 2: Please get in contact with your Webmaster and let Bruce McKenzie (bmckenzi@fgdc.gov) know if they want additional links with your agency’s information added to the FGDC Geographic Information Resource.
Action 3: Bruce McKenzie will let the Coordination Group members know which of their agency links have been loaded in the FGDC Geographic Information Resource, so they can ensure that he is notified when those links change.
Suggestion: You could first link to FirstGov, so if you type the word “geospatial” there, then this FGDC Geographic Information Resource will come up.
FGDC Policy on Non-Federal GIS Standards – Julie Binder Maitra, FGDC
This is Julie’s second presentation to the FGDC Coordination Group regarding this policy. The objective of the policy is to provide a mechanism for the FGDC to endorse non-Federal standards. Nothing in the policy would supercede existing standards or policies. There are 2 levels of recognition: endorsement (same status as an FGDC standard) and recommendation (recognized as a useful standard, but not mandatory due to lack of broad applicability).
The proposed policy was in development since August 2002 and at the May 6 FGDC Coordination Group meeting consensus was developed on the general approach of the policy, although it was noted that it needed wordsmithing. David Morehouse wordsmithed the proposed policy, and the revised version went to the Coordination Group members for comment in mid-May. Comments were then received from NASA, DOT/BTS, and DHS.
Comments included recommendations for:
- Other categories of recognition
- Additional sponsors of the standard
- Increased influence by the FGDC subcommittees and working groups and the Coordination Group in the approval process
- “Sharing” data vs. “collecting” data
- MOU with external standards organization to distribute the standard free of charge
- “Exceptions” to accept without further review unless FGDC rejects the standard during the review process (to save time)
Next Steps:
- Approval of policy by Coordination Group
- Invitation for presentation to Interagency Council on Standards Policy (IGSP) at NIST on June 4
- FGDC Steering Committee endorsement of policy
Comment: OGC is concerned with the absence of framework
Q: How do you bring a de facto standard into this?
A: It would go through the steps to become an FGDC standard (depending on how well you could document it).
The language in the policy needs to be clear.
Action 4: Julie Binder Maitra will continue to rework the language on Section G and Section VI and will move the policy forward by electronic ballot before the next meeting.
[ PowerPoint 449KB ]
The National Map Demonstration – Rick Pearsall, USGS
The vision of the National Map is of a seamless, continuously maintained, nationally consistent set of base geographic data that is maintained through partnerships. It will serve as a national foundation for science, land and resource management, recreation, policy making, and homeland security. It will have data sets mentioned in OMB A-16 and the NSDI Framework, such as Elevation, Orthoimagery, Hydrography, Geographic Names, and Earth Cover. The National Map will use standards from the Geospatial One-Stop, FGDC, ANSI, ISO and OGC. The National Map partners with Federal, State, regional and local governments; private industry; academia; libraries; and volunteers to provide current data. The data access portal for the National Map has distributed data servers with OGC compliant web map and data services. USGS staff is being retrained to participate in this effort and regionally based staff will conduct partnership activities with the State, regional and local governments.
Agencies should steward their data from their own web map servers and the National Map will link to it.
[ PowerPoint 7.16MB ]
Open GIS Consortium Update – Sam Bacharach, OGC
OGC specifications are available at www.opengis.org. OGC has 260 members worldwide from 30 countries and 5 continents. OGC has 11 approved implementation specifications. OGC has an Interoperability Program, a Specification Development Program and an Outreach and Community Adoption Program. There are many OGC projects underway. For example, the OGC Web Services (OWS) Initiative is for information interoperability on the web using specifications from the rest of the IT world. OWS candidate specifications are: common architecture, image handling, feature handling and sensor web enablement. There is an OGC Conformance and Interoperability Test and Evaluation (CITE) Initiative so you know if you are interoperable – it queries your server and evaluates the response. There is also an OGC Critical Infrastructure Protection Program (CIPI-1) that has alert messaging for automated telephone calls and is currently working on schema translation. CIPI-2 is a Census Bureau Pilot that deals with TIGER information (boundary data administration) served over the web. For more information please visit the OGC website.
[ PowerPoint 6.57MB ]
Next Coordination Group meeting:
(Note: July meeting is cancelled due to the Independence Day holiday)
August 5, 2003
Hosted by FCC at their office on 12th & D Sts.
(An agenda with location info will be forwarded in late July)