Minutes of Digital Earth Cluster Telecon - Dec 17

Present
Rob Raskin (OceanESIP), Ken Keiser (UAH), Silvia Nittel (ESPNet), Bob Chen (CIESIN), Jim Frew (UCSB), Bob Downs (CIESIN), Sue Heinz (PO.DAAC), Steve Marley (EcoLogic), Ruixin Yang (GMU), Jamie Smedsmo (TerraSIP)

Reports and Announcements
Silvia reported on the OGC meeting in Vancouver. WCS progress was discussed, but more time was devoted to the Web Feature Server (WFS). NASA held a telecon prior to that meeting to discuss NASA input. Most of that meeting also was devoted to WFS and not WCS. The GAI meeting scheduled for last week was delayed until January. Two NewDISS awards included WMS/WCS development work (Rob and Tim are Co-I's on these projects). One award will cover the cost of incorporating a WMS Viewer into the SWIL. Another successful proposal (written mainly by Ken K.) will cover development of ESML, and looking at how ESML can be used in WCS as a data description language.

Proposed Federation Technical Workshop
We discussed a series of Technical Workshops to be used to share technical expertise and experience with one another. These would include FGDC Metadata Training (Bob), MapServer (Tom Burk), WMS (Rob), and ArcIMS. The audience is intended to be technical persons, who might not always attend Federation meetings. The Workshops could be held at the July Federation meeting (DC is the planned location) or could be standalone. The standalone option was the consensus choice to enable a larger amount of time to be devoted, and to be sure that appropraite facilities are available (e.g. for taping). Rob will present a proposal to the Federation.

GIS Services Brochure
Very few entries have been received so far for the GIS Products/Services insert into the Federation P&S brochure. We need these prior to the January meeting.

January Meeting
We will meet over lunch at the Federation Meeting (likely on Wednesday). The next telecon is Monday Jan 14.