Doug Nebert is the Clearinghouse Coordinator for the FGDC Secretariat in Reston, Virginia. He has worked for the past 16 years for the U.S. Geological Survey first on water resources applications of geographic information systems, then metadata standards and software, and finally, with the FGDC on standardized methods of GIS data dissemination to promote discovery and re-use. He is currently involved in Geomatics standardization in ISO Technical Committee 211 as expert representing the Open GIS Consortium. Doug is also the Technical Working Group Chair of the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) activity, an outreach activity for advice internationally on establishing compatible spatial data service implementations.

Statement of Interest for the Workshop: For the international base of the Geospatial Data Clearinghouse it would be very helpful to establish a searching convention for the return of structured geospatial "place" information, similar to a DNS or LDAP response such that a user/software could retrieve authoritative or non-authoritative coordinate and reference info for a place. This is a type of geographic names service. Microsoft has proposed something similar, called Uniform Geographic Locators in the past, but I have not heard further work. The creation of a protocol and syntax for the query and retrieval of geographic place information would be a most useful outcome that geographic service providers could adopt. These should include governmental and commercial sources of place information and not be limited to traditional mapped locales but should support address matching for maximum application.
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Douglas D. Nebert
Clearinghouse Coordinator
FGDC Secretariat
Phone: +1 703 648 4151
Fax: +1 703 648-5755
Pager Messaging: http://fgdclearhs.er.usgs.gov/dougmsg.html
Email: ddnebert@usgs.gov