RE: Revised meeting notes for October 7th

Thanks to Eliot Christian for catching a key omission in my notes!

Meeting notes for October 7, 2003 OASIS EM GIS SC Teleconference

In attendance: Carl, Elliot, Rex, Thomas, Clark (for ESRI), Gary, Gopal

1. Had a short discussion on Forms. Agreement that while there is no way the GIS SC can influence commonalities content and structure standards for Government Forms across all Government. We can make progress on the smaller subset of EM-relevant forms so long as we accept that some obviously common elements (name, address...) may be differently defined across communities of practice. (Eventually a common semantic registry is envisioned to help with this broader issue, but that has been very slow in getting off the ground.)
We also discussed documenting best practices for coding geospatial elements that are in these forms. Examples of best practices might be how to express a coordinate reference systems (e.g. WGS 84) and recommendations for geocodes, such as the ISO standard for country codes (editor's example).

2. Short discussion on the Symbology Interoperability Requirements document. No changes other than recommended edits/additions received via email. Carl is to collate, update and repost by Friday, Oct 10. Should be viewed as a fairly stable position and recommendation document.

3. Good discussion on what the GIS SC should do next. Discussion focused on best practices and approaches for using XML Schema for encoding EM Symbology content (art work). Following was suggested:

Let's take a look at what other work has been done in this area and evaluate and then determine if it is useful.
Need to develop a controlled namespace (vocabulary) for symbology names that could be used for a EM symbology registry and Web Services interfaces. Subcommittee could define or recommend an interface for accessing and portraying EM symbology. DMIS said that if such an interface existed, they would be willing to test it.
Discussion on symbology, layering, operational pictures. Questions concerning separation of EM symbology into separate layer(s) as well as (or as opposed to) EM symbology being displayed as part of an existing GIS layer being served up from some GIS database.

These discussions will continue during our next teleconferences.

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