[Freegis-list] Cooperative mapping project proposal

[Brett Matson]

Hi Felipe and everyone,
	
>	I strongly support your initiative. Leaving the initiative 
>to the user, such a system has chances to be as successfully as 
>another initiatives that share the same principle (think about 
>the Free Software/Open Source movement).

I'm glad to hear such enthusiasm for the project. Thanks for 
your thoughts on how it should be done.

>To build a such infrastructure that enable and incentive the 
>participation of a user community, I think there are 3 main 
>issues to be addressed: (1) data structure, (2) metadata, and 
>(3) user interaction.

>How you will receive, store and send the data: you have choosed
>to use the shape file format, which is a good choice, since it 
>is well documented and there is a very good Free library available 
>to deal with it, as you stated before. But you could also use a 
>traditional RDBMS to store it, in a OpenGIS Simple Feature 
>specification fashion, and send and receive data in GML2, for 
>example. And also receive classical GPS tracklogs in NMEA format.
>Just another possibilities.

I have spent quite a long time trying to work out how this should be
done and I'm still looking at options. You mentioned the GML2 format
for GIS data. I would like to use this in order to comply with OpenGIS
standards but I'm not aware of any free web-GIS that can support it,
or any conversion tool that can read/write it.

The format of GPS track logs is also something I've been meaning to 
learn more about. Do you know if NMEA is a format used by the majority 
of GPS receivers? If not, are there many GPS log formats that make up the
majority of the market share?

>I think the main problems that you will have to deal with are about 
>metadata. Digital Geospatial Metadata is on the top of my interest 
>subject list. Currently I am reading some standard specifications 
>(from US FGDC, ISO, Auzlig and Dublin Core), but the long-term 
>objective is to build a generic Free MDBMS - Metadata-base Managment 
>System (unfortunetely, it advances as time allows). Maybe we can 
>share some ideas and work, making the project of each one better 
>and avoiding duplicated effort. Just a thought. 

Sharing some ideas and work on this subject would be good. I'll have to
do a lot of reading on the subject before I'm up to speed with it though.
A free MDBS sounds like a great idea. 

>And about the 3rd issue, I think a set of guidelines would be enough 
>to drive the users efforts. And, when in doubt (about category 
>classification, and data assurence, for example), I would leave the 
>decision to the user. Maybe a rating mechanism of bases by users 
>would be a good reasonable solution.

I think you might be right here. I guess what I'll be doing initially is 
trying to find out what does work and improving the process over time.

>I also recommend you to take a look in some papers about ontologies in 
>semantic interoperability for GISs. Frederico Fonseca, from University 
>of Maine (www.spatial.maine.edu/~fred) has some papers about it.

Thanks. I'll have a good look at some of those papers.

>Best regards,
>Felipe Nievinski.

Thanks again for your advice and support.

Brett