Cordial introductions, ICMISS and the future of METADATA

[Greg Long <glong@dlwc.nsw.gov.au>]

As requested at joining this email list I'm going to ignore my natural desire
to 'eavesdrop' and instead introduce myself (and then eavesdrop).

My name is Greg Long and I'm employed by the Department of Land and
Water Conservation (DLWC), NSW. 

I'm Project Manager of ICMISS (Integrated Catchment Management
Information and Support System), on behalf of the Executive Director of
DLWC's Geoinformation Program and NSW Surveyor General, Dr Don
Grant. 

DLWC is partnered with the Hawkesbury Nepean Catchment
Management Trust and we are working closely with NSW Agencies
including EPA and NPWS in delivering this project.

ICMISS? - A prototype development due for release in July 1997 that
uses the Internet, World Wide Web and METADATA to index, retrieve and
integrate spatial and textual data using simultaneous on-demand access
to custodian data servers. 

How it works! - The user, via their Web browser, selects required
datatasets from the Metadatabase, ICMISS then retrieves selected
datasets from THE ORIGINAL SOURCE (ie. the URL internet address etc.
attached to the metadata record), spatially integrates them and displays
them in a 'catchment' metaphor or any 'boundary' the user
prefers/configures.

Whoa - Can't be done you say! 

Well... it can really - all the *tools* required to do this exist eg. WAIS,
SGML, CGI, HTTP, Z39.50, HTML etc. etc. -- even the GIS and RDBMS
vendors are/have built 'web' serving front-ends to their proprietary data
formats (eg. ESRI' Internet Map Server, Genasys' Spatial Web Broker,
Mapinfo's Spatialware Server, Oracle, Informix/Illustra etc.) which makes
data-to-server-to-internet-to-web transactions possible.

What *was* lacking, until now, has been the METADATA standard and
commitment to persist with it. 

METADATA - now there's the rub.

ICMISS will demonstrate why and how adoption of a METADATA
standard (Page 1 level within State or Page 0 for universal access - any
thoughts ??) is the absolute lynch-pin, the glue, that makes the ICMISS
concept possible. By conforming to the eventual METADATA standard,
any agency wishing to serve up  ICMISS access need only acquire the
ICMISS public domain software tools that will be developed *and* permit
access for ICMISS to incorporate their data.

So metadata will be much more than a 'catalog' of available data.
Consider the NSW NRDD CD-ROM product for example. If it were to
include URLs and various access information about datasets, it's not a
big step to then provide physical access to entries in the metadatabase -
Z39.50 includes such information and I understand ANZLIC
implementation may do similar.

Since we're in development phase, promotional/descriptive material is
scarce and there's a LOT I haven't mentioned (mostly risk stuff like data
quality, pricing, access, spatial referencing, integratability etc.)

A paper  (Long, G. and Hunt, G. 1997) will be presented at the University
of Western Sydney in July describing the project implementation in detail
and a prototype demonstration - all things going according to plan.

So there you have it - an introduction and an announcement. 

>From the aforementioned I'm clearly very interested in how we (Aus)
work with the metadata, SDI et al.
 
Any comments/suggestions/critiques gratefully received 

Greg Long,
Project Manager ICMISS, Centre for Natural Resources
Department of Land and Water Conservation, NSW, Australia
email glong@dlwc.nsw.gov.au http://dlwc.nsw.gov.au 
Phone 61-2-9895-7445 Fax   61-2-9895-7867