[Freegis-list] Cooperative mapping project proposal

[Felipe G. Nievinski]

Hi Brett.

Sorry for the late response.

Last wednesday I met a research group on GIS from my University - now I am
part of it.
There is a project from this group wich aims to develop a architecture for
geo-data delivery via Web. It seems it will begin by metadata (in the 1st
phase), and then advance to the data itself, so the Metadata-base Managment
System that I meant has a very good prospect to be used here.
Maybe we'll receive some funding to conduct this project, but even if it
does not happen, there will be more people working on it than there is
today. I'm trying hard to convince them to implement it as free software.

> 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.
>
AFAIK, there is not a free software library that supports it. Stephen Lime,
Internet Applications Analyst from the Minnesota DNR said they are currently
working to add GML output to UMN-MapServer. And I'm trying to convince a
colleague to build a shp2gml conversor...

> 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?
>
NMEA is a well accepted format. But some vendors, like Garmin, commonly add
its own keywords to implement some additional features.

> >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.
>
the Bazaar style... (from the Eric Raymond's book).

Good luck, and stay in touch.

Felipe.