April 2017

April 2017 working notes Members (BOLD means they were on the call)
■ Emily Law, President
■ Christine White, Vice President
■ Helen Conover, Chair, Finance
■ Danie Kinkade, Chair, Partnership
■ Mike Daniels, Chair, Governance
■ Matt Mayernik, Chair, Data Stewardship
■ Shelley Olds, Chair, Education
■ Rich Signell, Chair, IT & I
■ Tracey Pilone, Chair, Nominations
■ Soren Scott, Chair, Products and Services
■ Beth Huffer, Chair, Semantic Technologies
Others on the call: Erin Robinson, Bruce Caron, Annie Burgess
Agenda:
Review of prior month’s notes: Christine and Shelley moved and seconded. Minutes approved.

President’s Report
ESIP response to NSF RFI on Future Needs for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure: Loomio and google doc were used to draft and discuss a collective response. Bruce and Erin helped synthesize various input. Christine and Emily finalized. Resulted response has been submitted to NSF. You can find it here on figShare.

CEOS WGISS: The 43th work group meeting was held in Annapolis, MD, April 3-6. Agenda and presentations are available here. Meeting included Technology Exploration Workshop and GEOSS-WGISS Interoperability Workshop.GEOSS evolution and architecture is built upon 6 work packages (WPs) in which WP3 Data Management Principles is led by ESIP and CODATA. AmeriGEOSS initiative focuses on 4 societal benefit areas: agriculture, water, disasters and biodiversity & Ecosystems. Will be useful to connect ESIP clusters to these activities.

Kudos: Annie K., Dan K. and Bruce for supporting ESDIS’ ESDSWG meeting held in Annapolis, MD, March 21-23. They did a great job. Bruce gave an excellent overview [youtube] of ESIP during the meeting.

Staff Report
● Erin - Working on proposal for potential USGS funding. FY16 audit completed. Confirmed sponsorship for Summer Meeting from Indiana U, FigShare, Element84 and Esri.
● Bruce - ESDSWG was a success. Meeting planning/visioneering for Summer is going well. Site visit at IU to scope meeting venues. Figshare portal up and running.
● Annie B: Two confirmed evaluators for SemTech Evaluations, Finalizing Community PROV Challenge, AIST Final Report, ESIP Lab Page, Summer Meeting Sessions in.

Committee Reports

■ Finance - Special call for travel support for Summer Meeting was due yesterday. The intent was to fund speakers for breakouts that don’t normally attend.
■ Partnership
○ Having a rough start getting committee on a regular meeting schedule!
○ Reviewing 7 membership applications for spring class available from the partnership wiki. In process of requesting additional info for “light” applications.
○ Scheduled to pass membership applications to staff/assembly for review by COB Friday. Some questions about the granularity of potential member organizations.
■ Governance
○ Created an initial outline of the ESIP Policies & Procedures document, with guidance from ESIP leadership (e.g. Bruce).
○ There are notes in the outline that make references to the existing ESIP Bylaws document to make sure we were not duplicating material there.
○ There are notes in sections of the P&P for which prior materials can be used.
○ The P&P Outline has four major sections and so the intent will be to “divide and conquer” by assigning one section to each Governance Committee member.
○ Our next telecon is on April 17.
○ Questions: Is the outline a draft? It is open to comments. This document is open/living and can accommodate lessons learned and working rules that can be easily updated by the committees. So it needs to adapt to new circumstances.

■ Data Stewardship
○ Produced a document providing perspective of data centers on gov. “Data rescue” activities: http://www.esipfed.org/press-releases/stronger-together The document has achieved some positive responses. The next step is a more formal. Question about formalizing the Data Management Training effort as a working group. Have there ever been sub-committees? What is more durable? Cluster? Working Group? Perhaps look at connections to other committees, such as education?
■ Education
○ Continue workshop planning for EER and ESIP education workshops. Talking about synergies with the drone cluster.
○ Working with partners at UCAR SciEd to publish eBook “Got a Drone, Try this”. Looking for the right CC license. And looking to give it the optimal home. Teachers need to be happy with the look and feel of the work AND feel comfortable with ‘trust’ of content (not ‘commercial’ in disguise; Agencies and non-profit are more trustworthy eg. NASA, NOAA, USGS etc are trustworthy sites). This is the first ESIP book. Tracey might have some good information on book publication.

■ IT & I
○ Last Tech Dive Webinar: 9 March 2017: "Introduction to Esri Story Maps": Christine White, Esri
○ Upcoming Tech Dive Webinar: 13 April 2017: "Processing Planetary-Scale Data in the Cloud": Drew Bollinger, Development Seed
○ Working with IOOS colleagues on “model of the month” Executing interoperability workflows reveals all the problematics of this complex endeavor. Keying on time and location dependent WMS. Solving one problem may solve a lot of related problems in other modeling workflows.
■ Nominations
■ Products and Services
○ FUNding Friday modification call for Apr 12 Visioneers (rule updates, voting, Fri morning scheduling). Looking for new thoughts on voting in real time.
■ Semantic Technologies
○ Beth attended the RDA Plenary in Barcelona and ■ agreed to co-lead a task force on metadata extensions for improving search relevancy as part of the Search Relevancy WG;
■ Other interesting activities/sessions: a new WG on technical framework for brokering services. This would be a framework on which developers could implement applications for performing ubiquitous data preparation tasks. (Think regridding, reformatting.) Of note: this aligns with the goals of the ESIP tool match project, as well as the theme of the summer meeting of Strengthening Ties Between Observations and User Communities. There’s also an ESDS focus group looking into this topic. Jay Pearlman was at the brokering services meeting and was interested in having the semantic tech committee members help with an evaluation of a semantic project he is involved in. We exchanged contact info and agreed to discuss. I had a good discussion with Keith Jeffery, who is leading a metadata effort for RDA and is convinced that robust ontologies are necessary to adequately capture the detailed metadata that will be needed to actually machine-to-machine interoperability. I plan to reach out to him and create some collaboration opportunities between ESIP Sem Tech and the RDA metadata group.
■ Sem Tech submitted two session proposals for the summer meeting. One will be a working session to plan for a second geosemantics symposium, which we hope to turn into an annual event. The goal is to having a planning session at the summer meeting to identify speakers, themes, etc. and then give ourselves plenty of time to come up with a plan, work out a budget, submit a budget request, etc. We also submitted a session for brainstorming with prospective semantic technology users to come up with testbed proposal ideas. Hopefully this will be fed by a joint workshop that we intend to participate in with the Drone cluster. We are also targeting the ESDA cluster to muster a crowd. Lewis McGibbney will be hosting a session on semantic technologies available at Apache, which should dovetail nicely with the other efforts.

Other Business:
● None

Meeting adjourned at 3:50