Minutes of Digital Earth Cluster Telecon - Sept 11

Present
Rob Raskin (JPL/OceanESIP), Mike Routhier (UNH), Howard Burrows (Raytheon/IBM Watson), Ken Keiser (UAH), James Gallagher (DODS), Bob Chen (CIESIN), Greg Yetman (CIESIN), George Percival (Digital Earth Program Office), Marguerite Syvertson (JPL/Digital Earth), Silvia Nittel (UCLA).

Announcements

The first draft of the Tutorial is complete. Everyone should look it over and provide comments and/or contributions (including computer code).
The Cluster is officially a Working Group within the Interoperability Standing Committee. This status will enable us to have more "clout" within the Federation, if needed.
Presentations of Cluster activity will be made to Digital Earth Program Manager Tom Taylor on 9/12 and possibly to the Digital Earth Community Meeting on 9/19.
There is $90 million available from NSF to be awarded this calendar year and a similar amount available next year. Funding is also expected to be available as a result of PITAC - President's Information Technology Advisory Committee.

Dataset Compliance
Several ESIPs discussed possible datasets that could be made WMT-compliant in time for the January meeting. Mike mentioned NDVI, Global Reference Model, vegetation classes, soils, and elevation data. Ken mentioned several datasets from his ESIP and Bob mentioned population data and China data. James pointed out that the DODS/WMT gateway under development will enable a DODS server to accept WMT requests, creating a large number of WMT-compliant datasets. It is possible that this wrapper can be freely distributed, but that is not clear at this point.

Rob will set up a spreadsheet to serve as a central list of the status of Federation data to be made WMT-compliant. A similar list is maintained at the Digital Earth Program Office to help scenario developers become aware of potential data sources. Rob mentioned an interest in creating a new scenario involving El Nino prediction and commercial applications. This would make 5 scenarios in total.

Federation Search Engine
The Federation Search Engine takes a user to meatadata, and not data, even though it elicits a spatial-temporal range. Several expressesd an interest in pursuing this, as it would provide great visibility for the Cluster. Such a search engine would take a user directly to a Digital Earth Viewer. It also could provide "thumbnail" images in its list of results. A sample viewer is at http://viewer.digitalearth.gov . It also would be desirable for the search engine to have a front end that processes natural language requests. This is a common interest of both the Federation and Digital Earth, and could be the basis of joint funding.