06/12/06 TC

Attendees: Rich Ullman, Yonsook Enloe, Ananth Rao, Glenn Cunningham, Allan Doyle, Siri Jodha Khalsa, Ming-Hsiang Tsou, Helen Conover, Jingli Yang

Next SPG ALL telecon : Wed Jan 17 at 3pm ET

New and Old Action Items:

• Dec 7 – Rich will invite Beth to have one of the ECHO developers review the Backtrack RFC (Tech Note).
• Jan 17 – Rich Ullman will invite Chris Kemp to attend SPG telecon
• Jan 17 (carried over from previous telecon) – Rich and Yonsook will talk to Don F. about the next steps for the FGDC Vegetation Classification draft standard.
• Jan 17 – Rich, Ananth, Helen – provide review comments of the Backtrack RFC (Tech Note).

Notes/Discussion:

• Generally, profiles of standards are good standards to endorse. The more precise a profile is, the better for implementation. However, SPG cannot be limited to endorsing only profiles of standards. We need to consider many potential standards in all areas of EO data systems.
• Discussed the Technical Note Process and came to agreement
  • Author submits RFC as Technical Note and specifies whether an evaluation of the Tech Note is desired. If the Technical Note is a pre-cursor to a future standard, an evaluation will probably be desired to coalesce community opinion
  • SPG will do an initial evaluation on the candidate RFC Tech Note and evaluate the quality of the document, whether it serves a useful purpose, and whether it is technically worthy. SPG may invite experts to help with the initial evaluation for technical worthiness.
  • If the candidate RFC Tech Note passes initial evaluation, then the SPG will agree to accept the RFC as a Tech Note. If a technical evaluation is desired by the RFC Author, a TWG will be formed to create the evaluation criteria.
  • SPG Chair will email the announcement of the acceptance of the RFC as a Technical Note, explaining its applicability. If an evaluation is desired, then the evaluation criteria document will be emailed along with the announcement of acceptance. If an evaluation is desired, then the RFC Author will identify a list of stakeholders who should be invited to send their evaluations. In all cases, the community will be invited to send general comments via email or to discuss via the plone site. SPG will appoint a member to summarize general comments regularly and to bring to the SPG the summary and any noteworthy comments. When the announcement of the acceptance of the RFC as a Technical Note is emailed to the general community, the NASA HQ Program Chair (Martha Maiden) will be cced on the email per our discussion with Martha at the SPG meeting on Nov 14
• RFC 1-3 revision status – Helen, Allan, and Yonsook are revising the first three RFCs to reflect the changes to the process we agreed to at the SPG meetings on Nov 14-15. They hope to have the first revision completed before the January SPG telecon.
• WMS RFC Status – Allan is waiting for the completion of the Process RFC revision. Then the WMS TWG will re-evaluate the Operational Review responses for Operational Readiness.
• HDF RFCs status – Helen said that we received an additional 11 usability review comments from the users at the HDF workshop. Now ready to evaluate operational readiness. The TWG will convene to discuss what that criteria should be.
• The Backtrack Tech Note has been submitted. Helen is the editor. It is ready to review by the SPG members. Helen will send url to Backtrack Tech Note to the SPG email list for SPG review. Rich, Ananth, and Helen volunteered to provide review comments at the Jan telecon. We will need at least one more reviewer.
• AURA Guidelines Tech Note – Jingli – document is being revised to beef up the motivation section.
• Other potential RFCs? At the Nov meetings, Ed Armstrong was talking about submitting the CF Vocab as a Tech Note.