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FW: Universities, has ImageNet come knocking?
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From: Hugh Phillips
To: clearhs_wg@fgdc.er.usgs.GOV
Subject: Universities, has ImageNet come knocking?
Date: Wednesday, 19 February 1997 8:02AM
Clearinghouse Working Group Members -
While this message is most relevant to Universities establishing
Clearinghouses, some of the issues discussed are important to
all involved in this group.
A professor at UW-Madison, Steve Ventura, suggested that I look at the
ImageNet site (http://www.coresw.com/) as a possible avenue for
organizing/searching GIS data held on campus. Core Software seems
interested in having Universities evaluate and utilize their product, to
the
extent of offering a 'grant program' for their software.
I looked at the site, and reported my findings to Steve. Core heard of
this, and contacted me about it. I offered to send my evaluation to
them
and Mr. Clinton Libbey of Core Software responded to it. I have
attached
the message below.
So - other Universities out there, working on Isite already, is ImageNet
making similar proposals to you? Have you made any evaluations?
FGDC - I am sure you have looked at this already. Can you comment?
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Date: Mon, 03 Feb 1997 18:16:30 -0500
From: Clinton Libbey <clinton@coresw.com>
Reply-To: clinton@coresw.com
Subject: [Fwd: imagenet comments]
To: hphillips@macc.wisc.edu
Organization: Core Software Technology
Hugh,
James forwarded this to me for comments. Hopefully this will give you a
good understanding of our system.
From: IN%"hphillips@vms2.macc.wisc.edu" "Hugh Phillips"
To: gis-library@macc.wisc.edu
Subject: take a look??
> Steve -
> I spent some time looking at this site. It has a reasonable search
> interface in lat/long and date, and in demonstration mode a simple
> search yielded a lot of hits for imagery with multi-level preview
> graphics.
Hugh, keep in mind that you can set up your system (with no programming
required) so that a user can search based on city name, as well as the
ability to zoom in and out of a map base (Currently CIA World Data Bank
2, Digital Chart of the World in Feb 97) to select their area of
interest.
> To summarize: The Core Software site seems useful for locating commercial
> remote sensing imagery (I don't think they are consciously limiting this to
> imagery, this observation just reflects what they currently index) from a
> number of vendors simultaneously.
That is correct. The system supports the dissemination of any type of
data. Currently vegetation maps over Australia are available from the
National Resource Information Centre in Australia, and parcel maps as
well as Tax roll data is becoming available through a county agency in
California.
> There are a number of characteristics of
> this operation which seem limiting however.
> This is a commercial operation, and as a result money is involved at some
> stage. While they are offering a limited time free trial to use their
> search interface, and AAG, ASPRS, and URISA members get a one year free
> trial, it seems that at some point this will cost to search.
This is true for people logging into the commercial site at Core
Software Technology. Currently CST has opted to make the system free to
everyone in the foreseeable future. However, the software grant that we
are proposing to you will allow anyone to log in to your site and query
your data sets for free. That is why we call it a grant and not a
subscription or paid license. The purpose of the grant program is to
allow Universities to have access to free data from other universities.
CST will provide access to commercial data sets as well as free data
from universities, government organizations and others.
> Secondly, most
> (lets say 99%) of the data they can search is commercial data, which means
> that using the results of your successful search is also going to cost
> money, and in the case of satellite imagery, as you know, this usually means
> fairly big Bucks.
Once again, that is for the commercial data sets. Currently there are
over 10 universities that are making their data sets available for
free. Therefore, your users will have access to a variety of data sets
from around the world supplied by other educational institutions. We
call this program, University Data Access and Sharing (UDAS) Program.
> Admittedly, they claim to be able to search public data, and indeed they
> might be able to index everything that also occurs on NSDI nodes, but in
> their search interface there is no check box for 'free' data and in fact no
> 'theme' or 'publisher' fields to search either. This reflects the likely
> scenario that their indexing is not based on very complete metadata. As a
> matter of fact, spatial extent and date seem to be the limit.
If a data base has the field of "cost" with an option being "free",
users can select "free" or whatever values you make acceptable for that
field. In other words, you can restrict what values are put into each
field so that you eliminate the possibility of user error. In addition,
ImageNet supports the querying of FGDC metadata. However, most data
sets are not in FGDC format to begin with and therefore end up on line
without a significant data conversion effort necessary. In setting up
the system, you can determine which fields are available to the user
initially and which fields can be made available by clicking on the
arrows so that they point downward. This is similar to the user
interface on the MacIntosh file system. ImageNet will search by 'theme'
or 'publisher' or any other field that you have in your data base. This
is actually a big advantage to the system since it will search
distributed archives with different data structures running on different
Relational Data Base Management Systems on different computer
platforms.
> There seem to be two 'products' available from this company: a license to
> use their search engine at their site, and possibly the ability to license
> their search engine and interface for local use.
That is correct. However, we have made the license to use our site
available at no cost. With regards to the system for local use, we are
offering a grant to the University of Wisconsin. We believe that your
organization can contribute quite a bit to the UDAS program which
currently has systems installed at Purdue, University of Georgia at
Athens, University of Oklahoma, University of Idaho and several others.
> In my estimation, neither of these two products look particularly attractive
> for the purposes of the library or a campus Clearinghouse. The search
> interface being assembled for USGS for Isite based NSDI Clearinghouses is
> much more flexible, it is free to use, its contruction is open for
> inspection (in most cases the code is available), and the FGDC is responsive
> to user suggested improvements. Browse graphics as demonstrated by this
> commercial site are also possible from CSDGM metadata (and accessible from
> the FGDC JAVA based search query report form). Although NSDI Clearinghouses
> are presently dominated by metadata on federal and mostly free data, there
> is nothing to exclude commercial firms from contributing to an NSDI node (in
> fact it is in their interest). Thus there is the potential that through the
> FGDC search gateway you could discover everything you could through the
Core > Softwares site.
I am sorry to hear that you feel that FGDC is more flexible. I believe
that if you look further, you will find that ImageNet offers a
significant amount of additional functionality and flexibility with a
commercial company supporting the system. The software requires no
HTML, SQL, C or TcL programming in order to hook your databases to the
web. For your purposes, the system is free for you to use as well. As
all successful software companies are, we too are responsive to customer
feedback.
> Should we make our metadata and public data available to be searched through
> the Core Software site? I don't think so - it would lead to more work for
> us probably, and I can't see an advantage that it holds over an NSDI site
> implementation. Naturally, Core Software is interested in having data
> (metadata) posted to their site - it means their subscribers get more bang
> for their buck.
The level of effort to hook up a data base is extremely low. After all
it is a grant and you have nothing to lose with the ability to save
quite a bit of time and effort. The data conversion required for NSDI
nodes is extremely high and you are required to do quite a bit of
programming as well. I would like to offer you the challenge that we
discussed. All you have to do is dedicate a day or two with customer
support staff standing by and you will have your data on line accessible
in a very interactive and commercially supported environment. Hopefully
you find this helpful. Please contact me or James to discuss any other
issues.
Respectfully yours,
Clinton
***************************************************
Clinton Libbey
Core Software Technology
http://www.coresw.com
clinton@coresw.com
703-917-8700
703-917-0212 Fax
***************************************************
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Hugh Phillips, University of Wisconsin - Madison
General Library System / State Cartographer's Office
hphillips@macc.wisc.edu