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FGDC Subcommitte on Cultural And Demographic Data Meeting Minutes
Main Commerce Building, June 18, 2002  9:15 A.M. - 12:00 P.M
 
 
Attendees: Organization Email Address
Fred Broome (Chair) Census fredrick.r.bromme@census.gov
 
April Avnayium Census april.l.avnayium@census.gov
Chuck Croner CDC cmc2@cdc.gov
Lois Dean HUD lois_dean@hud.gov
Gary Guzzeau NCPC gairy.guzzeau@ncpc.gov
Erin Henderson FWS erin.henderson@fws.gov
Ted Hull National Archives theodore.hull@nara.gov
Matt McCready Census matthew.j.mccready@census.gov
Mona Rantala BJS rantalam@ojp.usdoj.gov
Ken Reinfield Doi/Self-Goverance
Anne Ruth Census anne.ruth@census.gov
Jim Summe CMS jsumme@cms.hhs.gov
David Painter FGDC dpainter@fgdc.gov
Stacy Wood NCPC stacy.wood@ncpc.gov

The meeting began at 9:15. Fred Broome (Chair) opened the meeting with introductions.

Review of work of other standards groups -Fred Broome (Unless otherwise noted)

FGDC Work
FGDC Civilian Imagery Group
http://www.fgdc.gov/
The Civilain Imagery Group is drafting a policy to unify the imagery to unify the the imagery policies with in the different Federal civilian imagery groups. The policy should help with licensing data
which is currently problematic for the Federal government.

The Cap Program - David Painter (FGDC)
http://www.fgdc.gov/funding/funding.html
The Cooperative Agreements Program (CAP) is a FGDC Supported funding program for organizations wishing to create or use metadata. This includes seed funds for establishment of metadata
work, funding to metadata trainers to educate individuals and groups in FGDC-compliant metadata, and to support a U.S/Canadian joint project to promote the shairing of data over a common geography. Any type of organization, Federal, State, local,academic, private or non-profit, is eligible for the yearly grants. Mr. Painter encouraged SCDD members to volunteer to review grant proposals.

"Public Health GIS News and Information" report - Chuck Croner (CDC)
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/about/otheract/gis/sis_publichealthinfo.html
Public Health GIS News and Information is a bi-monthly web report that focuses on geospatial activites, particularly the use of GIS as it relates to the field of disease control and prevention. It also covers geospatial activities within the federal government, including work by the FGDC, USGS, EPA and Census Bureau. Public Health GIS News and Information has been in publication since 1994 and currently has a subscriber base of over 5,000. To subscribe, please send requests to cmc2@cdc.gov.

REMINDER: All government agencies are required to have metadata on all geospatial data by 2003 or the agency will receive a fiscal penalty by OMB. Over 80% of all government data has a geographical component.

Geospatial One-Stop 
http://www.fgdc.gov/geo-one-stop/index.html.
Geospatial One-Stop is the OMB e-government initiative to spatially enable e-gov activities. More particularly, the focus is to accelerate the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI). In the future, FGDC voting relationships will be modified to give State, local, and Tribal governments increased input into the standardization process. Throughout the standards development, the votes will be valued at 1/3 Federal, 1/3 State, and 1/3 local/Tribal government. This provides different perspectives on a proposed standard and further acceptance of the standard by non-Federal groups.

Framework 
http://130.11.52.153/framework/framework.html
The goal of Framework is to provide a widely accessible dataset of base geographic data consisting of seven usable themes: Geodetic Control, Digital Orthoimagery, Elevation Data, Transportation, Hydrography, Governmental Units, and Cadastral. Each of the themes relate to a standard, and each of these standards are in differing states of completeness. Most recently, great progress has been made on the hydrography theme (supported by USGS). The hydrography theme as well as governmental unit and legal entity boundary information, provided by Census, will be used in The National Map, supported by the USGS. NOTE: The Census Bureau is in the midst of a large-scale update of TIGER. Under this program, TIGER boundaries will become current, being no more than one year old at any given time, positionally accurate within 5-10 meters, and will provide spatial coordinates for every structure in the U.S., including all housing and building structures.

ANSI INCITS/L1 T
he American National Standards Institute (ANSI) is the U.S. National standards group that focuses on the technical and conceptual implementation of standards. ANSI serves as the U.S. representative to ISO, the International Organization for Standardization. ANSI also works with the FGDC on Framework standards. This collaboration will make Framework easier to implement as a result of ANSI's involvement in private industry. Julie Binder Maitra is the liaison between FGDC and ANSI on this matter. ISO OMB A119 requires Federal agencies to use National and International standards whenever applicable before developing Federal standards. Working through ANSI, FGDC endorsed standards can be brought to the international standards forum (ISO). ISO focuses on the conceptual implementation of standards. Of the new proposed International standards, 20 deal with geographic information. This includes: - Geographic Information Quality Principles ISO 19113 - Quality Evaluation Procedures ISO 19114 - Metadata ISO 19115 NEW WORK ITEM: Open GIS Consortium (OGC) needs individuals to work on Geographic Markup Language (GML) modeling in respect to economic, medical, and historical data. NOTE: Julie Binder-Maitra, FGDC Standards Coordinator, is the FGDC member representative to both ISO and ANSI. She can provide access to standards documentation without having to purchase it. Contact Ms. Maitra at jmaitra@fgdc.gov or 703-648-4627. Mr. Painter submitted this information after the meeting.

NCPC-Stacy Wood (NCPC)
National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) works with the Washington GIS Consortium (WGIS). The WGIS is currently creating metadata and beginning in 2002, any data created must have documented metadata. WGIS would like to remain FGDC compliant in respect to metadata. Meetings held by WGIS are open and are held bi-monthly. Information can be found at  HYPERLINK "http://www.wgis.org/" http://www.wgis.org/.

Presentations
Address Data Content Standard-Progress Report - Matt McCready (Census)
The Address Data Content Standard is in its final stages prior to endorsement by the FGDC. Mr. McCready described the content of the standard and its progress. Also described was the final portion of the standard being created, the UML (Unified Modeling Language) model. The Powerpoint presentation is attached.

Governmental Unit Boundary Data Content Standard - April Avnayim (Census)
The Governmental Unit Boundary Data Content Standard is currently a working draft. In order to move forward and submit the working draft to the SCDD for review and comments, with submittal to the broader FGDC Standards Working Group to follow, the Governmental Unit boundary metadata file, the metadata example, and the UML model must be completed. The Standard will be presented at the National Association of Counties (NACo) and ESRI conferences in July 2002. The Powerpoint presentation is attached.

Metadata Needs at Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services - Jim Summe (CMS)
Mr. Summe, statistician, discussed the metadata needs at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). This group, formerly HCFA (Health Care Financing Administration), uses Social Security Administration (SSA) state and county codes and Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) state and county codes in creating the geographic data used for provider reimbursement, coverage areas, research and policy decisions, and statistics on programs. The problems CMS has encountered in mapping include indexing by FIPS code, changes in the canonical definitions of counties, states, and other entities, and difficulty finding historical boundary data (from 1965 to present). Mr. Summe set forth these problems with a set of ideal resolutions. The resolutions included discovering the canonical definitions of counties and other governmental units since 1965, creating data structures in the identification of entities, cross-referencing code sets for different applications and computing platforms, and constructing standard metadata to understand and access these codes. Ideally, CMS would like to translate the codes they use, including SSA codes, FIPS codes, and ZIP codes, into a user-friendly set of codes. Suggestions were made to locate information about epidemiological studies in respect to privacy concerns, particularly the work of Mr. Jerry Rushton, to utilize the Census/NOAA CD "Spatial Patterns of Socioeconomic Data from 1970 to 2000" to view political boundaries and population studies since 1970, to refer to ANSI X3.31 (currently under review) for definitions of counties and other governmental units, and to contact Ms. Wendy Thomas at the University of Minnesota who works with digitizing historical boundary files.

DISCUSSION: The SCDD discussed the relative lack of geospatial information related to Tribal governments. NOTE: Mr. Painter added, after the meeting, the newly established FGDC Tribal Working Group may be a forum for resolving tribal issues. The contact co-chairs Ed Liu, EPA, liu.ed@epa.gov, 202-564-0287, and Richard Moore, BIA 703-390-6306. (The working group does not yet have a website.)

ACTION ITEMS:
Mr. Broome offered to provide the Census/NOAA CD "Spatial Patterns of Socioeconomic Data from 1970 to 2000" to anyone desiring. Contact Mr. Broome at frederick.r.broome@census.gov.

The next SCDD meeting will be held the late August or early September, 2002.