Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant Awarded to Tufts

Tufts University has received an award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the development of The Open Geoportal Cloud Federation. As part of the award we will be developing the following components in the coming year:

1. Develop a working prototype for cloud-based, Automated Federated Solr Metadata Harvester supporting multiple metadata formats (1/2013-12/2013).

2. Develop of a formal organizational structure for the Open Geoportal Federation which includes:

A. Host a National Open Geoportal Summit to provide training and develop consensus agreement on roles and governance. Travel for selected attendees funded. (Summer/Fall 2013).
B. Develop the opengeoportal.org to provide collaborative capacity to manage application development and share best-practices (12/2012-2/2013).

New Metadata Toolkit under Development

Tufts University has acquired funding to develop an open source metadata clearinghouse toolkit: a cloud-based, light weight metadata authoring environment.  Our goal is to provide rapid guided metadata authoring. The site will employ controlled vocabularies from the Library of Congress API and the OGP thesauri. It will also facilitate the import and export of geospatial metadata records from the OGP cloud of metadata (currently around 40,000 metadata records). It will also provide a crosswalk to/from multiple metadata formats. It is being developed in collaboration with Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley.

April Boston Meeting

Stacey Maples from the Yale University Map Department got the ball rolling for a regional, one day OGP  meeting. We’re meeting on April 13th at MIT.  This is a regional meeting for schools in the northeast that are starting to set up a production system.  Our agenda is now available.