Minutes of Digital Earth Cluster Telecon - Oct 16

Present
Rob Raskin (JPL/OceanESIP), Mike Routhier (UNH), Howard Burrows (Raytheon/IBM Watson), Bob Chen (CIESIN), Ken Keiser (UAH), Ruixin Yang (GMU), Jiang Tang (GMU), Ken Markowitz (ELIS), Tom Yunck (JPL/GENESIS),

Announcements

Rob and Howard gave a presentation to the Digital Earth Community Meeting in September. This meeting brings together all potential users of Digital Earth.
A presentation was made to the Community Engagement Committee of our activities. They will support our work wherever they can.

Funding from the Digital Earth Office
Rob reported that funding may be available from the Digital Earth Program Office to support activities of the Cluster. We discussed priorities of how to best make use of the funds. The DE Program Office has been reluctant to fund scenario efforts directly, despite the Office's strong push for scenario development. However, in our case we are able to leverage heavily upon work and collaborations already present in the Federation. Several working scenarios initiated within the Cluster should be great publicity for the Federation, because some of the previous scenario development work has stagnated. Funding also could support development of a new search engine for the Federation that leads the user to data and images (rather than metadata, as is currently the case). The search engine also could add domain knowledge and a natural language interface, because Digital Earth aims to greatly expand the user base of digital georeferenced information.

Dataset Compliance
A spreadsheet is now available listing the status of Federation data with regard to WMT-compliance. Each group scheduled for Jan 2000 compliance indicated that they were on schedule for compliance by that date.

New Scenarios
Several new scenarios were discussed. Ken Markowitz would like to develop a Legal scenario, involving wetalnds, forest and climate issues. Bob can develop a Sustainability scenario involving environmental metrics that could be used as a decision tool. Ken Keiser is interested in expanding the Hydrology Cluster's work into a scenario. Rob is interested in an El Nino scenario.

Tucson Meeting Plans
At the upcoming Federation Meeting, we are planning a formal demo that demonstrates data interoperability. We'll ask the Interoperability Committee to help sponsor this event. We also will present a Tutorial to other ESIPs that might be interested in becoming WMT-compliant. Finally, Rob will ask Tom Taylor (Digital Earth Program Manager) to give a presentation to the entire Federation. There also should be an opportunity for a Cluster Report to the entire Federation. We'll have a Cluster Working Group meeting sometime that week. It may be desirable to schedule an additional Group meeting later this year.