March 21, 2007 Meeting Minutes and Agenda
AGENDA:
• Approval of the February 21 st meeting minutes - Chair
Subcommittee Reports
• Financial - Dan Walters
• Policy & Marketing - Marilyn Lutz
• Technical - Will Mitchell
• Status on the GEOPortal - Will
• Guidelines for Portal Administrator - Marilyn
• Orthoimagery Project / Purchased ortho products- Larry
Harwood
• Parcel Grants - Larry
Status of GeoLibrary Board bond request
Geolibrary Annual Report
Geolibrary funding
Meeting Minutes:
Present
Jim Page, Chair ( by phone )
Marilyn Lutz, Co-Chair
David Blocher
Nancy Armentrout
William Hanson ( by phone )
Elizabeth Hertz ( by phone )
Gretchen Heldmann
Christopher Kroot
Will Mitchell ( by phone )
Ken Murchison ( by phone )
Staff
Dan Walters
Larry Harwood
Visitors
Barbara Charry, Audubon Society ( by phone )
Mary Cloutier, OIT
Carl Nylen, ESRI
The Co-Chair presided for this meeting, hereinafter referred to as the
Chair. The meeting was called to order at 10:13
1. Approval of the February 21 2007 meeting
minutes
Some revisions were asked for in Section 3 - GIS Stakeholders Report.
1) The Stakeholders Charter needs top be referenced. 2) The 4 th sentence
on MEGIS participation needs to be modified to show MEGIS staffer chairs
the Stakeholders Group. 3) The 3 rd sentence needs to be revised "They
are not a governing body but the Group is advisory to the CIO"
The Chair entertained a motion to approve the minutes. Christopher Kroot
moved to approve the minutes as amended with Nancy Armentrout seconding.
The Board voted unanimously in favor. The motion carried.
3. Status of Geolibrary Bond request
The Chair moved to topic 3 to accommodate Jim Page, calling in between
flights. Jim and Barbara Charry ( former Board member ) supplied most
of the information.
The governor's bonding request has been announced at 441.3 million.
The Geolibrary request is not part of that package. It was speculated
that not having a supporter in the Governor's office certainly did not
help. The alternative previously discussed of having a funding bill sponsored
in this session of the legislature is also not possible. Last session
one Rep. Ted Koffman, a contact of Barbara's, had sponsored a funding
bill but that was not carried over to this session. Barbara will contact
him nonetheless to see if any action can be taken. There is still interest
and support at the State Planning Office which is good for the future
but seems of no import at the present moment.
One optimistic possibility that was discussed with interest was amending
an existing bill to include some funding. This might even be a 'resuscitation'
of a failing bill. Ken Murchison agreed to contact the Aroostook County
delegation about this with the focus on how the county was losing resources
and grant opportunities thru the lack of Geolibrary funding. Ken also
agreed to contact his local representative Rep. Jeremy Fischer on this
matter. Jim Page will send Ken all of his relevant bond materials. At
10:40 Jim Page and Barbara Charry left the conference call.
2. Subcommittee Reports
Financial
Dan Walters reviewed the updated report on bond expenditures. Of particular
note, $31,464 for 2004/2005 aerial photography has been disencumbered
and is added to funds remaining. Also $4,959 previously charged to the
Geolibrary Account was moved to another cost center and the town of Stonington
gave up on their parcel grant adding $1,000 to funds remaining. Total
funds still under discussion ( i.e. not encumbered ) are $65,483.
Technical
Status on the GEOPortal .
There has been no progress since the last meeting due to everyone on
the Technical Committee being extremely busy. Ionic is standing by for
input on the final GUI ( graphical user interface ). MEGIS staff has
some time at this point to make a preliminary design, hopefully in a
couple of weeks. It was noted that this would be a "mockup" for discussion
and not a functional web page.
Guidelines for Portal Administrator .
There has been no progress to report on this item. There was some discussion
of what the Portal Administrator would be tasked with and this discussion
re-visited the GeoPortal status and related matters.
Orthoimagery Project.& Photo Products
There was nothing new to report on the orthoimagery. The aerial photo
products are almost complete; all of the scanned aerial photos have been
received and only the last of the control data remains.
Parcel Grants.
Parcel data has been coming in at a steady rate. There is a backlog
of six towns to review.
Policy & Marketing
The Chair handed out two documents. One was a draft of Policy: Dissemination
of Geospatial Data : Fee Setting ( attached as Appendix A ). The
second was a list of questions raised during discussions about the
draft policy which the Chair reviewed for the Board.
1) Concept of value added services for geospatial data
What functionality would recoup cost of development?
What are people willing to pay for?
2) Are we legally tied to the recouping of copy costs
3) Where is the line between the Geolibrary Board and the private sector
regarding activities that provide value added services.
4) Who pays associated costs for the provision of public data by state
agencies to the Geolibrary Board?
After the Chair's review and elaboration of these questions, a long
discussion ensued ranging over a number of topics which have been issues
for the Geolibrary Board before. The following is a summary of the major
points of discussion.
• What is the nature and function of the Geolibrary? There
were some observations - data storage, seed money for projects, metadata
repository and the primary repository for non-state agency data. The
consensus seemed to be that the Geolibrary should be the public face
or front end of all GIS data in Maine and dealing directly with the public.
• What should be the relationship between the Geolibrary
and MEGIS? Some Board members thought the Geolibrary has been confused
with the Maine Office of GIS and state government. In theory the Geolibrary
is a public portal for all GIS data and MEGIS handles state agency data.
Because the Geolibrary uses MEGIS services for many things there seems
to be a 'branding' issue that needs to be resolved. A concrete suggestion
was to review again the Memorandum Of Understanding between the Board,
the GIS Stakeholders and MEGIS.
• Costs of the technology. What are the actual costs of maintaining
data storage and the GeoPortal both in state government and contracted
out? Dan and Dave Blocher were asked to get cost estimates on things
now done by OIT and MEGIS.
• Funding possibilities. One topic discussed in some detail
was value added services, providing a service over and above just presenting
the data. There was concern that this would be competing with the private
sector. Bill Hanson noted that the Geolibrary legislation was not clear
on this matter. Other possible sources of funding were discussed including
the venerable 'cost of reproduction', a fee on professional licenses
for access to orthoimagery, charging fees for data - seen as unlikely,
and even advertisements as per Google. The Chair also described the UMO
Spatial Data Commons project - an example of essentially free, open source,
mutual data storage.
• Housing non-state data. There was some discussion of the
desirability - or not - of centrally housing non-state agency data, especially
municipal data. The cost and time involved in collecting and updating
data from many sources would be great. It was also pointed out that the
GeoPortal is in fact intended to link up many individual repositories.
4. Geolibrary Annual Report
.The Annual Report having been completed prior to this meeting, this
was not discussed.
5 Geolibrary Funding
Much discussion on funding had already taken place. This item was tabled
to the next meeting.
Meeting was adjourned at 12:20 PM
