Meeting Report
X3L8 Special Interest Group
Held at the National Institute of Standards and Technology
January 21 & 22, 1998
Attendees:
Bruce Bargmeyer, Environmental Protection Agency
Eliot Christian, US Geological Survey
Larry Fitzwater, Environmental Protection Agency
Denis Hill, ISO/BSR (by telephone)
Robert Lewis, Environmental Protection Agency
Doug Mann, Pacific Northwest Laboratory
John McCarthy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Judith Newton, National Institute of Standards and Technology
Phong Ngo, Science Applications International Corporation
Frank Olken, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Dan Gillman and Judith Newton chaired the meetings.
The following reports the issues raised and decisions made:
ISO/IEC 11179 Part 1 is out for CD ballot. The SIG recommends a vote of "approve with comment". Dan Gillman led a discussion of potential comments to make on the ballot. The comments are to be presented at the L8 Plenary for approval. Dan will produce a final CD version with an accompanying document describing the resolution of comments.
We discussed SC 32 organizational issues and developed a draft response to the US TAG to SC32 position paper. The draft was presented to the L8 Plenary/TAG meeting for approval.
3. Metamodel for the Management of Sharable Data, DpANS X3.285
Phong Ngo and Doug Mann have completed the work necessary to get this out for public review. The review period is from Dec 5, 1997 to Feb 3, 1998.
We called Denis Hill in Geneva, Switzerland on a speakerphone and discussed the upcoming meeting that will be held with the BSR production team. We will work on analyzing EDI messages in order to register them in an ISO/IEC 11179-based registry. We will explore the potential for continuing collaboration between the meeting participants. We expect to work on X12 transaction sets used for the environment, transportation, healthcare and census data. The meeting is scheduled for March 2 - 6, 1998 at NIST. Denis Hill, Hartmut Hermes and Annelies Glander of the BSR production team are expected to participate. We discussed the agenda. On the first day we will start with an overview. Denis Hill will describe the BSR Status and then describe how to extract concepts and terms from EDI messages. A presentation will also be made about the Environmental Data Registry (EDR). The EDR may provide a platform for recording BSR information. L8 members are to propose specific X12 transaction to analyze. We will try to spend a day analyzing each of four transaction sets--one from each of the four areas named above. Members are requested to propose transaction sets and make available information about the selected transaction sets.
The Workshop is to be held April 15-17, 1998 at the Bureau of Labor Statistics conference center.
Phong Ngo reported that NCITS has approved l8 sponsorship of the meeting. It will also be sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Bureau of Census, and possibly by others.
We discussed potential speakers with the following suggestions:
Al Pesachowitz - Opening
Peter White - 11179 in healthcare
John McCarthy/Frank Olken - XML/RDF metadata transfer
Tom Wason - Learning Objects using 11179
Doug Mann X3.285
ISO/IEC 11179 editors
EDR implementation - ?
Bob Mayes - Healthcare
Multiple metamodels (FGDC, GILS, Dublin Core) issues vs. 11179 - ?
Sharing content - ?
Dan Gillman will see if he can get a third room for demonstrations.
We decided that we prefer to have tables for participants to sit at, even if this means that fewer people can attend.
The major theme of the workshop is to discuss implementations of ISO/IEC 11179 and ANSI DpANS X3.285. A tentative set of topics and an agenda was set out in the last L8 SIG meeting report. We revisited the purpose and decided the primary focus should be on information exchange and establishing areas of collaboration. Workshop themes would include:
Information exchange, introduce concepts to new (or potential) implementers
Establish collaboration between registry efforts.
Extend and harmonize of standards and content
Extend the utilization of 11179 to new universes of discourse.
Get a few data registries underway with efforts to exchange metadata between them.
Identify areas where one organization can take a lead in developing particular capabilities that can be shared with others.
Frank Olken and John McCarthy reported on the work they are doing with the W3C RDF schema working group. Work is progressing rapidly. We discussed various aspects of organization and content that we would like to see included. We are particularly interested in including the capability to reference the metadata in data registries. Frank and John are working on a demonstration that can be given at the Metadata Registry conference to be held in April.
This National Science Foundation (NSF) initiative is funded through the Technology Innovation Fund and administered through the Chief Information Officer council. NSF is leading a multi-agency project to improve the interoperability of government systems. The call for projects may focus on specific areas such as disaster information or the sharing and dissemination of statistical information. Among the interoperability issues may be information discovery and data fusion--issues that depend critically on metadata registries. This is potentially something that we should try to work with.
We discussed the potential creation of a new ISO Technical Committee to deal with EDI. The members did not express interest in joining such a committee.
9. National Metadata Infrastructure
We discussed this and will try to find out more about it and investigate the possibility of engaging this activity. The contact is Brian Kahin in Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President.
February 20, 1998 at NIST- Informal SC30/WG1 and SC/14 + others interested SC32 pre-meeting
February 23-25, 1998 at NIST - SC32 Planning Meetings
March 2-6, 1998 at NIST - Meet with BSR production team
April 15-17, 1998 at Bureau of Labor Statistics Conference Center - Metadata Workshop
May 13-15, 1998 at Pennsylvania - Possible Joint L8 - T2 meeting.
June 10-12, 1998 at NIST L8 SIG and Plenary
Directions to NIST North: NIST North is Building 820. The address of this building is 820 West Diamond Avenue. Note that the building is located across the street from the main campus of NIST. Instead of turning onto Bureau Drive toward the main Gate of NIST, turn the opposite direction (North) onto Bureau Drive and take the second possible right turn to get to the NIST North building, The building has the name "NIST" on it in large letters. (From Interstate 270, driving North, take Exit 10, which loops under the freeway, and then turn RIGHT at the first stop light--this is the intersection of West Diamond Avenue and Bureau drive.)
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X3L8 documents, including this meeting report, are available via Anonymous FTP from sdct-sunsrv1.ncsl.nist.gov. Change directory to X3L8 (X3L8 in lowercase letters) and check the "readme" file for details. Many of the documents are also listed on the X3L8 Home Page. The URL is http://www.lbl.gov/~olken/X3L8". If you have questions or comments on this document send email to bargmeyer.bruce@epamail.epa.gov.