_____   __________________  ____  ____ 
              /  _/ | / /_  __/ ____/ __ \/ __ \/ __ \
              / //  |/ / / / / __/ / /_/ / / / / /_/ /
            _/ // /|  / / / / /___/ _, _/ /_/ / ____/ 
           /___/_/ |_/ /_/ /_____/_/ |_|\____/_/      
                                                       
               _   __                  __     __  __           
              / | / /__ _      _______/ /__  / /_/ /____  _____
             /  |/ / _ \ | /| / / ___/ / _ \/ __/ __/ _ \/ ___/
            / /|  /  __/ |/ |/ (__  ) /  __/ /_/ /_/  __/ /    
           /_/ |_/\___/|__/|__/____/_/\___/\__/\__/\___/_/     
**********************************************************************
Number 9     ***         INTEROP NEWSLETTER      ***        April 2000
**********************************************************************

In This Issue:
--------------

I.   CEOS IDN Meeting Agendas:
     a) IDN Task Team Splinter, Tuesday April 11, 2000 5:30 PM, London, UK
     b) IDN Task Team Meeting, Thursday April 14, 2000 9:00 AM, London, UK

II.  Current Population and Usage Statistics

III. Report on the European Territorial Management Information 
     Infrastructure Conference

IV.  Report on the International Oceanographic Data and Information
     Exchange (IODE) Group of Experts on Technical Aspects of Data
     Exchange (GETADE)
    

**********************************************************************

                           IDN Task Team Meeting
                                      
                     Draft Agenda for Splinter Session
              Tuesday April 11, 2000 5:30 PM, London, England
   ______________________________________________________________________

     I. Review of Minutes from Virginia Meeting
    II. INTEROP Newsletter
   III. IDN Status Page/Node Reports for IDN Task Team Meeting
    IV. Post MD7 Activities
     V. IDN Collaboration With Other CEOS Groups
    VI. IDN Future
   VII. Issues
  VIII. Fall Meeting Plans
   ______________________________________________________________________
   The full agenda is available online:
   http://gcmd.gsfc.nasa.gov/ceosidn/London_IDN_Splinter_agenda.html

=========================================================================

                         CEOS IDN Task Team Meeting
                                      
                                Draft Agenda
              Thursday April 14, 2000 9:00 AM, London, England
   ______________________________________________________________________

     I. Review of Minutes from Virginia Meeting (9:00) 
    II. MD7 Status at the American Coordinating Node
   III. Ongoing Activities 
    IV. IDN Node Reports 
     V. IDN Collaboration With Other Groups (9:45)
    VI. IDN Future 
   VII. Issues - Discussion
   ______________________________________________________________________
   The full agenda is available online:
   http://gcmd.gsfc.nasa.gov/ceosidn/London_IDN_agenda.html


       _____________________________________________________________
       For more information or questions about these agendas, please
       contact Lola Olsen(olsen@gcmd.nasa.gov ).
       Last updated: 05 April, 2000
**********************************************************************

	Current Population and Usage Statistics: GCMD IDN Node
     ____________________________________________________________

The statistics for the public users of the American Coordinating Node
web site are separated in several computations.  Below are the
statistics for the DIFs retrieved using our WWW interfaces (Oracle and
Isite), the distribution of DIFs within Earth science topics, and the
distribution of DIFs by IDN node.


 Total DIF Retrieved
 -------------------			
Oct   1999	 43,695
Nov   1999	 29,061
Dec   1999	 25,393
Jan   2000	 24,726
Feb   2000	 17,361
March 2000	 39,051


The IDN currently has 7422 metadata records.  The DIF distribution by
IDN Node and Topics are shown below.

Distribution of All DIFs by Topic 
--------------------------------

      3090  ATMOSPHERE 
      2013  BIOSPHERE 
      1832  LAND SURFACE 
      1726  OCEANS 
      1160  HUMAN DIMENSIONS 
      1000  HYDROSPHERE 
      983   RADIANCE OR IMAGERY 
      925   AGRICULTURE 
      637   SOLID EARTH 
      431   CRYOSPHERE 
      171   PALEOCLIMATE 
      132   SOLAR PHYSICS 


                  Distribution of DIFs by IDN_Node
                  --------------------------------

IDN NODE                                    # DIFs      %    
-----------                                 ------      ---- 
ANTARCTIC/JACDM/PRIC/NADC                   1           0.01 
ANTARCTIC/JCADM/AADC                        283         3.81 
ANTARCTIC/JCADM/CN-NADC                     7           0.09 
ANTARCTIC/JCADM/IAA                         2           0.03 
ANTARCTIC/JCADM/NIPR/JARE                   14          0.19 
ARGENTINA/CONAE                             58          0.78 
AUSTRALIA/CSIRO                             22          0.30 
BRAZIL/INPE                                 26          0.35 
CANADA/CCRS                                 389         5.24 
ESA/ESRIN                                   180         2.43 
FRANCE/CNES                                 11          0.15 
GERMANY/DLR                                 66          0.89 
ITALY/PNRA                                  21          0.28 
JAPAN/JST                                   162         2.18 
JAPAN/NASDA                                 84          1.13 
RUSSIA/RAS                                  3           0.04 
UNEP/GRID                                   499         6.72 
USA/CIESIN                                  148         1.99 
USA/NASA                                    3319        44.72
USA/NOAA                                    1226        16.52
USA/USDA                                    607         8.18 
USA/USGS                                    294         3.96 

**********************************************************************

	 ETeMII Workshop on Metadata, March 23-24 Luxembourg
	      Rebecca Bilodeau (bilodeau@gcmd.nasa.gov )
     ____________________________________________________________

This workshop was put together to begin the ETeMII (European
Territorial Management Information Infrastructure) - the purpose being
to be able to provide guidelines/recommendations to the European
Commission to give to the member countries for geospatial information
metadata.  Yves Reginster was the workshop organizer.  ETeMII is a
framework to support political decisions in the Geospatial Information
domain.  There are 5 main goals: 1) Set up a network to reach a
consensus of metadata standards and implementation, 2) Support a
future direction for geospatial information in Europe, 3) To build a
consensus on technical issues such as reference data,
interoperability, standards, best practices, etc^?, 4) To work at
the European level, and the GSDI (Global Spatial Data Infrastructure)
level, and 5) To support public and private relationships.  The main
questions asked during the workshop were: How can we improve standards
to make them more user friendly, How can we build upon current
standards, How do we address multilingual issues?

Max Craglia, Department of Town and Regional Planning, University of
Sheffield, described recent policy developments on EGII and findings
from focus groups concerning user needs for metadata.  The final
report, "Geographic Information Policies in Europe: National and
Regional Perspectives", is found on the web at http://www.ec-gis.org.
He also described MADAME, a project running to December 2000, which
will address the issues of lack of awareness of data availability by
potential users, differing institutional mandates for those who
produce data, the variations across Europe in data access policies,
conditions for access and pricing, copyright, data security and
business practices.  MADAME will focus on geo-statistical and
cadastral information in particular and it will evaluate current
services providing access to data and metadata from the perspective of
current and potential users.  The overall objective is to move from
services that are producer-oriented to user-oriented services.  See
http://www.info2000-madame.org.

Other projects discussed included: ESMI - European Spatial Metadata
Infrastructure - An online place to search distributed directories.
See www.esmi.org, CLEAR Spatial Database www.info2000-clear.org,
European Environment Agency - European Topic Centre on Catalogue of
Data Sources (ETC/CDS) http://www.mu.niedersachsen.de/cds and
http://etc-cds.eionet.eu.int, The MEGRIN LaClef expansion to GDDD
Geographical Data Description Directory
http://www.megrin.org/GDDD/Overview.html.  The Dublin Core standard
was described and discussed as a potential standard to be recommended
by ETeMII.  It was agreed upon that ETeMII would put out a position
paper within the next month or two and would continue to investigate
different metadata formats before making any recommendations.

**********************************************************************

   International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE)
   Group of Experts on Technical Aspects of Data Exchange (GETADE)
             Monica Holland (holland@gcmd.gsfc.nasa.gov )
   ________________________________________________________________


The GCMD hosted the Eighth Session of International Oceanographic Data
and Information Exchange (IODE) Group of Experts on Technical Aspects
of Data Exchange (GETADE) at NASA/GSFC on March 13-17, 2000.

Discussions between IODE and GCMD included a recommendation for an
IODE node using the GCMD MD8 system, which is scheduled for release in
September, 2000.  The IODE Data Centers could be organized as
'branches' to the node.  The AODC (Australian Oceanographic Data
Center) is investigating the possibility of hosting the IODE node.

A new tool for entering metadata in a national metadata management
system was introduced by AODC to the IODE community. This new tool was
introduced as part of an on-going effort of the Marine Environmental
Data and Information Referral System (MEDI) to develop a metadata
software tool for the oceanographic community.  The MEDI metadata tool
is Java-based, hardware and database independent, and compatible with
the IDN DIF (uses the GCMD keywords, and other features).  The MEDI
tool was developed to encourage scientists to enter their research
results in a standard metadata format offline as they collect their
data.

Because of the offline management and compatibility with the GCMD,
this tool is being considered as a new method for entering metadata
for IDN users.

The GCMD and the Global Observing Systems Information Center (GOSIC)
collaboration efforts were also discussed.  GOSIC provides information
on the observing requirements, the operational data systems, and the
access procedures for finding and obtaining data and products of three
major international global observing systems - G3OS. The G3OS consists
of the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), the Global Ocean
Observing System (GOOS), and the Global Terrestrial Observing System
(GTOS).  For more information about GOSIC visit
http://www.gos.udel.edu Currently, the GCMD is refining a GOSIC portal
(an Isite free-text subset of the GCMD), which holds records only
related to the GOSIC project.

Future developments of other "IODE portals" within GCMD were also 
considered during this meeting.  For more information about
IODE and GETADE please visit:
http://ioc.unesco.org/iode/structure/getade/getade.htm