17 July 2014 -- Members of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) have formed an OGC Geospatial User Feedback Standards Working Group (SWG). The purpose of this SWG will be to reach consensus on a standard way to encode users’ comments on the results those users obtain when querying spatial databases. This effort has the potential to improve metadata, complement the producer quality indicators, extend the documentation about usability and usage of datasets, help data producers improve their data collection and publishing methods, and ultimately improve the quality of the data as well as the quality of analyses performed on the data.

The OGC Geospatial User Feedback SWG charter can be downloaded from https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/59800.

The explosive growth of geospatial data and related metadata has decreased the efficiency of data search catalogues. That is, the increase in the number of data resources often makes the discovery of a dataset that fits user requirements very time consuming. To make searches more efficient, many projects, such as GeoViQua ( www.geoviqua.org/), are collecting user feedback. All would benefit from a common user feedback model that is easy to implement, simple enough for the user to understand, and powerful enough to provide useful information for data providers. The SWG’s first task is to develop a conceptual model that will serve the purpose of creating one or more encodings for user feedback. The GeoViQua User Feedback Model ( http://www.geoviqua.org/UserFeedbackSystem.htm) offers a starting point for this discussion.

The Geospatial User Feedback SWG convenors invite the participation of interested parties from across a broad range of the geosciences, academic institutions, and commercial and government organizations that are interested in improving metadata catalogues and discovery portals so that they provide users with better, more “fit for use” results and data assessment capabilities.

The conveners of the GFU SWG are Joan Masó of UAB-CREAF, Simon Thum of the Fraunhofer Institute and Lucy Bastin of Aston University.

The following charter members of the SWG are committed to the charter and projected meeting schedule. Others may join this list before the SWG is officially chartered.

   Joan Masó - UAB-CREAF
   Lucy Bastin - Aston University
   Veronica Guidetti - European Space Agency
   Lorenzo Bigagli - CNR Institute for Atmospheric Pollution Research
   Simon Thum - Fraunhofer Institute
   Daniel Nüst - 52° North
   Erin Robinson - Foundation for Earth Science
   Ted Habermann - HDF Group
   Dorothea B DeHart - National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 475 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

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