Sharon Clarke, Theresa Valentine, Kelly Christiansen, Sean Healey, Terralyn Vendetta, Keith Olsen, George Lienkaemper, Maureen Duane, Matt Gregory, Ken Vance-Borland
Sean received award for notetaking and Kelly received a smaller award for thinking about doing metadata
Theresa reminded us that the metadata training was to begin at 1:00. A copoy of the metadata materials are available Publishing Metadata Training
Sharon gave an update on a recently submitted proposal to use student tech fees to make spatial data more accessible for undergraduates. Sharon, Phil Sollins, and Lisa Ganio wrote the proposal requesting funds to pay for: 1) a server to hold spatial data 2) a half-time data manager 3) 1000 student worker hours to set up the catalog, and 4) one month of a programmer's time to make the database web-accessible. There is a letter of endorsement on the web, and people across campus are encouraged to show their support for the project by signing the letter and adding their comments. The database would be available to all students, although accessing speed may vary across campus. A big thank-you to Sharon, Phil and Lisa for their work on behalf of the students.
There will be a meeting January 27 in the Valley Library at 3:30 pm *4th floor extended campus room, for those interested in creating a GIS Certification Program at OSU. This meeting is sponsored by the Earth Information Science and Technology Committee. Theresa explained that this program would allow people to receive in-depth GIS training without having to become graduate students. OSU currently has no major in GIS; this certification would function as a minor and would be a formal acknowledgement of a concentration in GIS-related coursework. George pointed out that there is a growing movement to have a national GIS certification program like those used in other fields to verify the training of consultants.
This data clearinghouse can be found at http://virtual-oregon.nacse.org/. As opposed to the proposed student GIS database, which would actually store data, Virtual Oregon allows searches of remotely held data sources. Established in May 2000 at Oregon State University with seed funding from the Northwest Academic Computing Consortium, the OSDP aims to : · archive and distribute environmental and other place-based data on Oregon and associated areas via an innovative web interface; · identify key data sets that are not yet available to users; and · facilitate development of statewide standards for archiving, documenting, and disseminating data.
Theresa added a link to the Geosciences framework group that is continuously updated. Sharon reported that there is a state-wide group that wants a statewide riparian census using air photos, remote sensing, and other data. They may populate their coverage using a process similar to Janet Ohman's nearest neighbor approach. Sharon was waiting for more information at the time of the meeting.
Terralyn reported that a replacement for sequoia (www.fsl.orst.edu/ftp.fsl.orst.edu) has been ordered, and it is the same class as castanea (www.cof.orst.edu). When the machine arrives, Coldfusion will be upgraded to Coldfusion MX at the request of the LTER group. Also the web server will be switched from Netscape to Apache, so that it is the same as www.cof.orst.edu.
In order to upgrade the Netscape client on the Sun workstations, they will need to be upgraded to Solaris 8. If interested in scheduling an upgrade time, contact Terralyn.
A question was raised about the 3 passes that the University has to the ESRI conference. Last year, the passes weren't used. Matt gets first access to the Forestry pass because he is the ESRI contact for support, and George may be attending, although the USGS is cutting back on travel this year. Members of the group should keep in mind that the passes exist.
George announced that the metadata spellchecker in ArcCatalog works nicely. It apparently interfaces with MS Word and uses Word's dictionary. George will send out a note explaining the tool.
Lastly, Theresa will send out info that she received about disclaimers that should be printed on Forest Service maps.
Last month, Lisa Ganio reported the potential problems with how Forestry Computing Resources charges users of spatial data. For summaries of this report, see Sharon (who has copies) or http://www.fsl.orst.edu/sdmg/sdmg1202.htm. Not much progress was made from where last month's meeting left off. See the minutes referenced above for a summary of the problem. Theresa said that Sean is going to try to open two spatial databases in one instance of SDE to try to get a better picture of how ArcIMS performs. Terralyn and Theresa complained about ESRI's documentation, and someone suggested that it might be worthwhile to hire an ESRI consultant to demystify the process. It was generally agreed that this option would be too expensive. No decision was made, pending the results of Sean's experimentation. Theresa will contact George and Sharon before the next meeting to look at Sean's results.
Theresa has a set of 1994 digital orthophotos that cover most of the state. She also has some 2000 orthophotos of Forest Service land. Both sets are in UTM projection. See her if you want to access to this data. Also, the Access database has moved; Theresa will be sending out a note about the change and will be altering the web page to reflect it's new location.
Maureen will talk about the LARSE database