P&S Monthly Feb 24, 2009

Minutes of the Feb 24 Products and Services Telecon

Attendees

Bruce Barkstrom, Cristina Bories (ECHO), Matt Cechini (ECHO), Yuechen Chi (GMU), Ruth Duerr (NSIDC), Danny Hardin (UAH), Wenwen Li (GMU), Dan Mandl (ECHO), Carol Meyer (Earth Science Foundation), Andy Mitchell (ECHO), Karen Moe (NASA), Rob Raskin (JPL), John Scialdo (Columbia), Tyler Stevens (GCMD), Phil Yang (GMU)

History of the Committee

This Committee in its early days produced brochures highlighting the products and services of Federation members. This activity predated the existence of the Federation Front Office (Carol) which now takes responsibility for marketing efforts. Later, the Committee initiated the development of a Federation-wide inventory of products and services, known as the Earth Information Exchange. An initial prototype focusing on air quality data was cdeveloped for the ESIP Air Quality Working Group by GMU and Washington U. The Committee also sponsored Workshops at Federation Meetings on metadata topics such as: consistent representations of data quality and identifying redundant metadata records.

Plans for coming year

Initial plans for the Committee will focus on activities for the Summer Federation Meeting. Some options include: a Metadata Fair, a Showcase of Federation member data services, a Technical Workshop on using and populating metadata, a tutorial on catalog services, a poster comparing the various standards, and presentations by members of the digital library community. Efforts toward consistent naming conventions are currently being addressed by the ESIP Semantic Web Cluster. There is interest in addressing deficiencies in current metadata standards by having our Committee directly propose extensions to the standards. Missing from current standards are concepts such as: versioning, service quality, provenance, etc. In general, services are not well described by metadata. The Products and Services wiki wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Products_and_Services will be used to post resources relevant to this Committee, such as descriptions of standards, tools, and portals (any Federation member may post content). Rob Raskin is Chair of the Committee; the Vice-Chair position is open to anyone interested.

Next telecon

A follow-up telecon for mid-March will be set up for a different day/time. Go to: http://www.doodle.com/526mf67n9xyptfcy to vote for the times most convenient for you.