On 12/29/07, michael gould <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It seems to me that having (maintaining) several terms helps us to reach > multiple diverse audiences. When dealing with government funding agencies > (i.e. ministries) the SDI term conveys formality and officialdom...which > does give some senior people (call them paleo-whatever) a warm+fuzzy > feeling. On the other side I agree that geo-web or other web-2.0 terms are > necessary to maintain audience interest. > > We saw these two worldviews collide, and then try to understand each other, > at a recent workshop on "volunteered geographic information, VGI" (another > acronym, sorry). http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/vgi/ (Mike L. was > invited but could not make it.) > ...
Fwiw, I prefer "Spatial Data Commons" over "Spatial Data Infrastructure" for many, many reasons hard to capture in one short email. Nevertheless, I agree with Michael. Each term has its own community and audience, and conveys a different facet of the same thing. There is no one canonical term to describe a multifaceted phenomenon as what we are dealing with. Use the best term for your purpose, and if you can't find one, create a new one. If it is good, and is reusable, it will find its own traction. One thing is true, however, in this emerging paradigm... the "warehouse" is the WWW and its search interface is the web (be it Google or Yahoo or whatever using "services"). Hence, all warehouses (infrastructures) have to be connected to the web. If they are not connected, they are not reachable and searchable, and hence, they are immaterial and irrelevant for our purpose (well, at least, as far as I am concerned). -- Puneet Kishor http://punkish.eidesis.org/ Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies http://www.nelson.wisc.edu/ Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) http://www.osgeo.org/ Summer 2007 S&T Policy Fellow, The National Academies http://www.nas.edu/ _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
