Spatial Data on the Web Best Practices Maintenance call
29 November 2017
Chris: From UK Met. Involved in OGC and also working with Simon Cox on time ontology.
… Also involved in the dormant SVG working group.
… My interest currently is more on the Time Ontology, the statistics, building ontologies on top of RDF Data Cubes and data telling through that.
… Not necessarily going to pay a close attention to BP maintenance.
Linda: One of the former editors of the Best Practices. Currently the Chair of the SDW Interest Group.
… Not sure how much time I will be able to devote to this Best Practice maintenance but will do my best.
… The section on gaps in current best practices is what I'm interested to focus on.
[Side discussion on number of persons present. Conflict with OGC meeting probably explains the lack of participants this time]
<Linda> It is actually the ISO meeting...
<billroberts> hi all - sorry I'm late - just wrestling the webex...
Michael: Working in Ordnance Survey. Been working on data APIs for the 6-7 last years. Seeing the Spatial data on the Web best practices be adopted is pretty important to me.
… Level of enthusiasm for these best practices, especially on the OGC side, that's very good.
Chris: About API, I don't know if that's one of the gaps, but certainly, a lot of the work we're doing in OGC is data retrieval pattern.
… We'd like to move on from the concept of Point.
… A data retrieval query language would be very interesting.
… Does that fit within what you envision?
Michael: Good point discussing the approach for some of these maintenance activities.
… Seeing how they apply in practice in different kinds of applications.
… Here are some caveats to this bp if you're looking at this kind of problem, etc.
… What works, how things evolve.
Chris: Any thoughts on that API idea, Linda?
Linda: The gaps that are described in the current best practices are [going through the list]
Gaps in current best practices in the SDW BP Note
Linda: One of them is what you're mentioning
Chris: OK, I think there are enough gaps for us to look into.
Michael: Providing opportunity for feedback from the community. You wrote this, what do you mean by that?
… It's worth for us, we have another reference, another best practice that we feel should be in the document.
Bill: Sorry I'm late. The thing I'm most interested in is seeing our best practices being applied in real life.
… The bit about APIs is definitely of value to me, matches developments I'm involved in.
… Among the gaps, an agreed geospatial RDF vocabulary would be very useful for the things I'm working in, as we keep switching from one vocabulary to another.
… Encouraging the take up of these best practices more broadly is something I'd like to pursue.
Michael: I'm relatively new to W3C, what's the usual approach for such maintenance?
Michael: Encouraging the adoption of the Best Practices. How to encourage adoption. How to gather feedback. How to cover the existing gaps that Linda mentioned.
… Would people think that these are good streams of activities?
Linda: We cannot work on all of the gaps at once. We probably have to select the ones that are most important for us.
Michael: That's a good point.
… Describing dataset and services behavior may be a good starting point.
Jo: CTO of PSMA Australia. Publication of geo addresses for Australia as linked data is what we're going through at the moment.
Bill: A significant difference from where we were a couple of years is that we're talking about updates to existing BP. That's more dissemination and outreach than a technical activity.
… I wonder if people have thoughts about that.
… Linda and others wrote papers about the best practices.
… How can we organize the group to have a coherent plan for communication?
Chris: How about calling some session where we can think about that?
… Through WMO, I plan to evangelize this work.
… We can propagate interest and raise awareness.
… That's something I can persuade my boss it's part of my job, probably.
… What is the workplan, what do we do?
… One of the first organizations to evangelize to is OGC. Still a silo. W3C is interesting because it's cross-domain.
Linda: Reacting to Chris. We already are evangelizing at OGC. WFS taking note of them.
… I'm fairly optimistic about that, the Best Practices were well received. We got mentioned in a lot of SWIG and WIGS.
… Another audience are developers, data users who can use spatial data.
… That's different audience.
… We could create a hall of fame, with examples of what is already out there.
… Maybe that will motivate people.
<Zakim> tidoust, you wanted to mention "flipcards"
Mobile Web Best Practices flipcards
Francois: Mentioning the history of flipcards done in 2007 to evangelize Best Practices to developers. Got very positive feedback, even years after. It might be a good idea to try to come up with a similar set of summarized version of the best practices.
Bill: All of these suggestions that people are making is good. My main point here is that we should make a plan.
<ChrisLittle_> +1 to Hall of Fame
<ChrisLittle_> +1 to 'crib sheets/cards
Bill: Track what people are doing, and coordinate our efforts. Of course, we're "volunteers", no budget, so we'll have limited activity.
Michael: I agree. That's a good discussion to have a pool of ideas mentioned.
… We are in the maintenance phase of these best practices. Different from new work on best practices.
… I'll do an email out to the group following the publication of the minutes of these meetings to share some ideas and activities we could be doing.
Michael: What is the best use of our time? Is it on encouraging adoption at the moment and soliciting feedback? Working on gaps that have been identified? Try to do a little bit of both?
Jo: Data publishers and developers. We can start with the group we're connected into.
… Categorize these groups
[scribe notes he was disconnected from audio for a minute]
Linda: You can use GitHub wiki pages, markdown document, whatever you like.
<josephabhayaratna> +1
<ChrisLittle_> +1 GitHub
Michael: Would everybody else be happy to use GitHub?
<billroberts> +1
<tidoust> +1
<Linda> +1
<MichaelGordon> +1
Chris: I believe we should do both in parallel. Once you have a comm plan, you can focus back on gaps. Denise does press releases at OGC for instance.
… We can focus on technical work once we have a comm plan.
Michael: Noting down things on GitHub seems a good start.
Jo: Who wants to create the bit for us to start the work?
Michael: I'm happy to do it if everyone's happy with that.
Jo: One of the things to capture: categories of users and things we're involved in. Also, what events are happening when we think we need a presence? Data research alliance, for instance. A great way for us not to miss opportunities.
Michael: I'm happy to sketch a structure there.
Bill: Getting Denise McKensie on the case is a great idea. We also want to target other kinds of people, those that usually do not hear about OGC and W3C.
… Seems important to extend beyond our usual circles.
Linda: Who of us is going to persuade Denise to join us?
Michael: Happy to catch up with her.
Jo: I'm actually with her next week. We're running a forum on Monday.
Chris: I'll keep proding her.
Michael: By all means, Jo, go ahead.
Chris: We can ask Denise about UN GGIM
Jo: The academic network as well.
Michael: I'll take these ideas from the minutes and pour them in GitHub.
… And then we can do more structuring.
Michael: Good discussion on the approaches for encouraging the adoption of SDW Best Practices.
… One of the other topics is timing of future meetings
Michael: This may not be the best timing for everyone.
… What are people's feelings about the best time and frequency of these group meetings?
Linda: I think the best time is a little bit later, maybe 1-2 hours later than this if you think of people joining all around the world. 8:00 UTC.
<ChrisLittle_> +1 to monthly intermediate to plenaries at same time slot
<josephabhayaratna> +1
Linda: If you choose a different week than the plenary, it should work.
Michael: Plenary one week, stats another, this one would be another one.
Bill: Two hours in one night is probably more than what we can handle after a day of work. At the moment, we're planning for stats call once every 2 weeks, but we might adjust that later on.
<MichaelGordon> +1
<ChrisLittle_> +1 bill
Bill: It's easy to keep track of a single day and time for all the calls of the group in any case. Swapping topics each week is good.
Michael: Looking at calendar, here.
… Wednesdays, 8pm UTC monthly meetings. Next call on 13th December?
Bill: Two weeks offset from the plenary call seems good to me.
<Linda> +1
<ChrisLittle_> +1
<ChrisLittle_> apologies will still be in NZ
Michael: OK, that sounds good.
<billroberts> sounds good to me
Michael: Definitely going with the monthly meeting, probably on the 13th for next call.
… I will take up the action of putting something in GitHub and I will pass that around into the wider group.
… In the next call, we can have some detailed discussion on the activities that we've started to discuss here.
… Thank you all!
Jo: I think I'm going to miss half of the next meeting.
Chris: Won't be around either.
<ChrisLittle_> bye