Minutes of Digital Earth Cluster Telecon - August 13

Present
Rob Raskin (OceanESIP), Ken Keiser (UAH), Howard Burrows (Raytheon), Bob Chen (CIESIN), Charles Falkenberg (EOS-Webster), Dave Etter (BASIC), Ruixin Yang (GMU), Greg Yetman (CIESIN), Pat Reiff (MTPE)

Funding
The Federation allocated all its remaining '01 funds for the NewDISS RFP. We discussed the possiblity of preparing a Cluster NewDISS proposal. It was pointed out that our focus is only on a portion of the end-to-end problem, and that may be a serious disadvantage. We continued the discussion off-line and it appears that we will pursue the proposal idea further. Anyone who is interested should contact Rob.

Cluster Name
At the North Dakota Meeting, we agreed to change our name to the GIS Services Cluster. That will eventually give us some new issues to address in addition to OGC compliance.

WMS 1.1 and WCS
When WMS 1.1 was approved in June, an initial standard was adopted for WCS - the Web Coverage Server. WCS is for data rather than images and is to some extent a subset of WMS (with the image paramters deleted). The initial format is HDF-EOS, and Liping Di developed a prototype WCS product. The WCS standards are something we should work on in the coming year.

Joining OGC
Bob Chen will look into whether the Federation can legally become a member of OGC. Being a member will be beneficial to both the Federation and OGC, as it will enable us to play a major role in the future WCS/WMS standards.