North American Data Model Steering Committee

Thirteenth meeting, November 10, 2004, Denver, Colorado

Attending:

Participating guests:

Reports:

  1. NADM's new website:

    The new NADM website, hosted by ESPRI (Univ. of Arizona / USGS) have been approved by the Steering Committee, and will be made public. Page revisions should be sent by Technical Team Chairs to Dave Blohm.

  2. Science Language Technical Team:

    The science language reports are finished, and will be posted to the NADM website. At this time, we do not plan to actively field comments and provide revisions to these documents (i.e., to provide "stewardship"). We will allot an unspecified amount of time for projects to evaluate and implement the documents in their databases, and then may consider stewardship. We will direct all comments to the TWIKI site. The TWIKI URL ( https://www.seegrid.csiro.au/twiki/bin/view/CGIModel/NadmSltt) should be added to the SLTT webpage and to each SLTT document.

  3. Data Interchange Technical Team:

    In order to develop a GML-based data interchange format, the Data Interchange Technical Team is evaluating the GML base features, to identify parts that are relevant to geologic map information. Then, the Group will consider adding other, geology-specific features including borehole information (from XMML). Some aspects of NADM C1 do not easily translate to GML, so in this process DITT is making minor modifications to the C1 schema. The DITT also will define a place to encode structural information such as strike and dip measurements.

    A longer-term goal is to encode science vocabularies. For example, mineral names, units of measure, geologic time (multiple scales, so that different maps of different vintages can be tied to the appropriate scale), and lithology (in the short term, they will encode LithClass6; in the longer term, they may decided to encode the SLTT reports). Progress can be monitored at the TWIKI site. It is anticipated that a draft GML encoding will be available for discussion at the Perth meeting later this year, and certainly before the next NADMSC meeting.

  4. Data Model Design Technical Team:

    The Data Model Design Technical Team reports that the GSC rendition of the C1 publication is now available on CD. Final comments to USGS (Dave Bedford) and Jordan Hastings will be addressed as soon as possible; his comments and our response will be posted to the TWIKI site, as will all comments in the future.

  5. Reference implementations:

    Eric reports that he has now implemented C1 in Oracle; this eventually could become a reference implementation. The NGMDB project also is implementing C1. Regarding last meeting's discussion that perhaps the Committee should charter a Reference Implementation Technical Team, Steve Richard noted no response to his offer to initiate a discussion on the topic. The Committee has decided to defer on this idea, and to watch as projects develop their own implementations; these could be evaluated and, perhaps, identified as reference implementations. When the GML code is available, the DMDT will begin to document the various project-level implementations of C1 (as was done for data model v.4.3). It was suggested that the GML code could be used to evaluate the conformance of C1 to these implementations. In order to test the GML schema, the GSC will develop a GML document that contains some map data; this will be discussed in more detail at the next Committee meeting.

  6. Other business:

    A. Affiliates list -- we will create a signup capability at the NADM website, in order to identify to whom we should send email notices of NADM meetings, products, etc. Obvious candidates include Eric Boisvert, Andree Bolduc, Murray Journeay, Jim McDonald, and Andy Rorick.
    B. PPDM -- Peter recounted his discussion with Trudy Curtis (PPDM), regarding possible collaboration. The Committee weighed his comments and decided to take no action at this time. Peter also provided a progress report on the GSC bedrock and surficial geology database projects.

  7. Next meeting:

    Baton Rouge, LA, during the week of the DMT meeting.