One thing I've been thinking about a lot is how to encourage more user collaboration in geospatial information. I've given some recent talks on this, and have found a lot of resonance, so want to start to actually build some of the ideas in to GeoServer (mostly as extensions, so we're not polluting the core with all kinds of crazy users).
The central idea is to get at the things SDI initiatives want - people sharing data. Most of the SDI initiatives I've seen have started with Metadata (get lots of catalogs), then focused on Users (get people filling out metadata and searching for it), and finally end up on Data (it will come after we get lots of metadata and users). I've viewed GeoServer's approach as the opposite - start with data, getting real data on the web. The next step is to focus on users, and after that lots of good metadata will fall out. How? Through users doing what they do on an infrastructure that supports them. Think youtube - with most viewed, highest rated, most favorited. Imagine GeoServer letting users create maps of sets of layers, with different styles and uploaded data. And imagine them rating and commenting on everyone else's. This produces valuable metadata about which data is actually used by others. So today I started an RnD page on the improvements I see needed to get to the basics. There's all kinds of fun things to derive once we get past the basics, but I want to start relatively easy. Let me know if you have feedback, see http://geoserver.org/display/GEOS/User+Collaboration This is focused on the GeoServer story, but probably more than half the story will be compelling GeoExt tools to make it all happen. But it'll be easier to build those with the server infrastructure. Elsewhere I'll try to write up the whole picture. thanks for listening. Chris -- Chris Holmes OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org Expert service straight from the developers. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H _______________________________________________ Geoserver-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geoserver-devel
