Hi, all,
The National Geospatial Advisory Committee (NGAC) met on Tuesday and Wednesday of last week (Sept. 23/24) outside of Shepherdstown, West Virginia at the US Fish and Wildlife's National Conservation Training Center. Here are the highlights of the meeting.
2. The meeting was devoted to reports from and work in the four sub-committees. All are writing white papers that will be released by the groups at the December meeting.
a. National Address Database (NAD): Identify compelling use cases demonstrating the value and utility of a NAD. This topic overlapped with geospatial privacy as there were a lot of questions about releasing the data to the general public.
b. Landsat Advisory Group (LAG): The group is working on a white paper describing the value of Landsat through 15 examples ranging from fire prevention to flood mitigation to wine production.
c. Education and Workforce Development: This group provided input to the Department of Labor on the next round of revisions to the Standard Occupational Classifications.
d. Geospatial Privacy: The subcommittee compiled observations on the "Big Data and Privacy" report and met with OMB staff to share their observations. They are working with FGDC staff to develop briefing materials on geospatial privacy issues for
the Federal CIO Council's Privacy Community of Practice.
3. We had a series of lightning talks including: changing boundaries in North Carolina, four eras of commercial satellite imagery, the legal argument for the US to go completely metric, and an update on the climate resilience app challenge by ESRI. I'll
just mention one here.
a. Jack Hild of Digital Globe talked about the four eras of commercial satellite imagery. The 1st era was the era of resolution going from Landsat (80m) to present day satellites that have a resolution of .31m. We will now only have small gains;
this era is over. The 2nd era was the accuracy. This is also near the end. The 3rd era is speed. This is where we are today. It's all about getting imagery to the ground and usable. Digital Globe can go from capturing an image to having it processed
and on the Web in 4 hours. (That was amazing to me.) The 4th era is content. Richer content is being obtained through advance MSI, LiDAR, etc. This is the big area that has opportunity for a lot of growth. We are moving from "show me where" to "show me
there." Where are the airfields? Where is distressed vegetation? Find me things that look like this, say an airport.
The next meeting will be in December via phone. All of the white papers will be completed and voted on by the members for acceptance and release.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Best,
Julie
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Julie Sweetkind-Singer
Assistant Director of Geospatial, Cartographic and Scientific Data & Services
Head Librarian, Branner Earth Sciences Library & Map Collections
Stanford University
397 Panama Mall; MC 2211
Stanford, CA 94305
(650)725-1102