Surveying, Mapping and GIS

Toward the end of this week I had the pleasure of spending two days with the folks at Research Triangle Institute. RTI is a 501(c) operated by Duke University, UNC Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, and North Carolina Central University and was formed in 1958 as one of the charter members of North Carolina's Research Triangle.

I had been bumping into a number of their people over the last couple of years, and it always seemed that we had many mutual interests. At any rate, we may well be forming some more solid alliances with RTI moving forward, to pursue geospatial applications development and environmental science. I was impressed with their capabilities, their ethic and many other aspects of how they operate.

They have many interesting things going on, such as a bioinformatics division, which is doing such things as modeling avian influenza on synthetic populations using a Linux supercomputing cluster, as well as much work for USEPA Office of Research and Development. Excellent breadth and depth in environmental and life sciences.

I could do a lot with an organization like this behind me - May this be a long and happy relationship...

I have been doing some work developing metadata records and automated processes for generating and updating metadata as part of data refresh and ETL processes lately. In the course of doing this, we are trying to develop means of providing very rich and well-documented, FGDC and Agency-profile metadata.

However, when it comes to attributes... Seems FGDC and ESRI both have put some disincentives in the way of capturing attribute data and documenting them painlessly.

http://www.fgdc.gov/metadata/csdgm/05.html

One could take the easy way out, and just put in an overview description and citation, and completely ignore any detailed description of the individual attributes.

Or, one could use ArcCatalog and extract a quick listing of attributes as <attr> elements - but.... ArcCatalog only captures and stores the <attrlabl> elements within this. In the infinite wisdom of the folks at FGDC and the folks that developed MetaParser, they then further require attribute domain <attrdomv> (and in my experience, 99.99% of most attribute data is either never validated against a domain, or validated outside of the GIS system, in the database, data capture or ETL process) and attribute value accuracy description <attrvai><attrvae> which I agree is valuable where applicable, but in many instances is not applicable, such as feature name, FID or other types of fields.

It tends to make providing detailed attribute information a disincentive, and steers folks toward taking the cop-out approach of just providing the overview description. Seems like an opportunity lost.

MetaCarta will be having their third annual Public Sector Users Group meeting again in Tysons Corner on May 23rd.

Time and circumstances permitting, I am definitely going to try to attend again this year - Last year at their Users Group, we presented MetaCarta technology integrated with EPA mapping capabilities in EnviroMapper, specifically Window to My Environment.

It's always great to see how folks are geo-enabling and spatially mining their assets using technologies like MetaCarta. Last year, they also demonstrated quite a few other interesting emergent things from their labs - some of their innovations, such as OpenLayers and TileCache have been catching on like wildfire.

For details and registration info: http://www.metacarta.com/PublicSectorUG2007/ - and tell John Henry that I said hello...