Dear Mr Tony Leggett,
First of all, apologies for this late reply. We are in holiday season on this side of the planet and as such I was out of the office until today. Second, don’t hesitate to call me Jeroen!
Thanks for your excellent offer for collaboration! This is great news for the project and I am absolutely sure all participants to the project will be more than happy to work together with you! As you probably know, we have already had contact with several people in Australia that are involved in the projects you mention. To get our collaboration of the ground, let me write down some thoughts that should allow this to go quick and smoothly.
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As an open source project we are open to anyone willing to contribute in a collaborative manner to the project. As such, we try to get all communications run through the project mailing lists. I therefor take the opportunity to directly introduce you to the community by copying your email to the GeoNetwork user list and strongly encourage you to use the available lists (currently user and developer) when discussing project development.
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As part of the GeoNetwork community, you are welcome to discuss, suggest and contribute in any way considered useful by the community. We definitely have a range of things to be improved both on the software as well as on the projects management and infrastructure side. A while back I have posted an email to the mailing lists discussing a range of the project related issues that need attention and I therefor invite you to also have a look at these. A list of software development related issues (functionality) is also available on the GeoNetwork Community website in the Workshop section. That should give a first idea of the issues that we are currently working on. It also illustrates that we still lack a good issue tracker and planning tool
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Add-on tools and utilities that can further improve the way metadata, data and services are created, served and used are also very welcome! We are currently working with ICIMOD in Nepal on developing a compatible Windows based metadata editor, but similar multi-platform editors (e.g. based on the Eclipse platform and uDig) would be a great thing too.
I trust this confirms our enthusiasm for collaboration with you and look forward to see you contribute to the project and participate actively!
Kind regards,
Jeroen
Jeroen Ticheler
FAO-UN
Tel: +39 06 57056041
http://www.fao.org/geonetwork
42.07420°N 12.34343°E
On Aug 11, 2006, at 7:41 AM, Tony Leggett wrote:
Hello Mr Ticheler,
I am the project manager for an Australian-funded project that has identified Geonetwork as an ideal software base upon which to build some additional tools to assist us in meta-data handling.
We would like to invite your team to be part of our project to ensure we remain consistent with your own software directions. At this stage our plan is to pay for any new code to be developed by commercial companies and then pass the code back into the open source environment on completion.
The overall project is funded by the Australian Government and is called the Australian Marine Science Data Network or ‘BlueNet’ for short. (http://www.bluenet.org.au/) BlueNet will link the data repositories and marine resources that currently reside in Australian academic and government institutions. A key contributor to the BlueNet project is a consortium of agencies including my own, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.
The specific component I am managing for BlueNet is called MEST: the Meta-data Entry-edit and Search Tool.
Our initial step will be to analyse the current functionality of Geonetwork. It is vital to us that we understand where your own team is actively working and then, either build on your efforts or, provide you with code that meets your needs as well.
If you are willing to collaborate in some way, I believe it would be of great benefit to all parties. I would like to establish a direct communication path between our two groups so that we maximise the collaboration opportunities.
Can you please conside this proposal and let me know how you see we might be able to work together?
Tony Leggett
Hydrology Unit
Australian Bureau of Meteorology
Level 10, 700 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia
(+61)3 9669 4606
Post: GPO Box 1289, Melbourne, Victoria 3000, Australia