Tuesday, August 4. 2009

Preserving Digital Geodata

More than a year ago I sat on a panel with Jack Dangermond and Vincent Virga (Cartographia). One of the questions from the audience at the New York State Geospatial Summit related to archiving geospatial data. If I recall, we tried to think about both the paper and other printed works that would need to be archived, but also the challenges for archiving digital data. None of use were experts, so I fear we raised more questions that we answered.

Now, the experts are weighing in. The Digital Preservation Coalition offers a PDF of a Technology Watch Report: Preserving Geospatial Data. It's a good statement of the state of the art, but the introduction makes clear that the recommendations are somewhat limited: "While these recommendations provide a basic checklist of issues to be considered when preserving geospatial data, it must be
emphasized that the collective experience in preserving such data is still very much in an early stage and that further investigations are needed."

Posted by Adena Schutzberg at 06:00 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) |

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The report appears to be a good one, but it provides no viable solution to the problem. The problem itself has been recognized for several decades but is it distressing that so little progress has been made in dealing with it.

#1 Duane Marble on 2009-08-04 13:01 (Reply)

Well, obviously it won't speak to all the issues, but it could improve the situation on the open vector data front if the GIS community were to start strongly supporting (e.g funding development of, using, promoting, demanding all their GIS software be able to use, etc.) SpatiaLite.

http://www.bostongis.com/PrinterFriendly.aspx?content_name=spatialite_tut01

#2 suggestion on 2009-08-05 20:29 (Reply)

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