The next NDSA Geospatial Content subgroup call is taking place this Friday, May 16, at 11:00a.m. ET. All are welcome!

This Friday's NDSA Geospatial Content Subgroup call will feature a presentation from Patrick Florance, Manager of Geospatial Technology Services at Tufts University who will talk about the Open Geoportal (http://opengeoportal.org/). 

The Open Geoportal (OGP) is a collaboratively developed, open source, federated web application to rapidly discover, preview, and retrieve geospatial data from multiple organizations.  The project is lead by Tufts in conjunction with Harvard and MIT. The Open Geoportal is also a collaborative community focused on establishing best practices supporting spatial data management:  collection development, metadata authoring & sharing, data sharing, data sources, data licensing, application development, etc. The community is comprised of geospatial metadata specialists, GIS specialists, developers, among others.

In 2010 Tufts began researching new products to manage its Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). Unsatisfied with the commercial offerings, Tufts decided to build its own geoportal software. Harvard and MIT both had pre-existing geoportals. Looking to increase application development and data resources, Tufts partnered with Harvard and MIT to build the first iteration of the Open Geoportal. The goal was to build one open source interface that provided access to all partner institution's data and metadata 

In January 2013 Tufts University began receiving support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the development of The Open Geoportal Cloud Federation. This lead to the first Open Geoportal National Summit in Boston in October of 2013. The Summit was a huge success, bringing together both domestic and international geospatial professionals (developers, GIS specialists, and metadata librarians) to share innovative ideas and best practices around open source spatial data infrastructure (OSSDI).

Currently there are over forty organizations and two hundred individuals participating in the Open Geoportal Community. With the support of the Sloan foundation and through a partnership with the GeoNetwork Open Source community, Tufts just completed the development of the Open Geoportal Harvester: an open source cloud-based platform that uses automated federated metadata harvesting protocols and supports multiple metadata formats to facilitate federated metadata sharing through the Open Geoportal Community. Tufts is also leading an effort to create the OGP Metadata Toolkit: cloud-based geospatial metadata toolkit to provide tools for staff, students, and faculty to easily create metadata for their data. The goal is to provide a rapid, guided metadata authoring environment.

Call information:
1.	Go to https://locosi.adobeconnect.com/digitalpreservation
2.	Enter your name in the text box
3.	Click the "Enter Room" button
4.	Dial 877-299-5123 for audio



Butch Lazorchak
Digital Archivist
National Digital Information Infrastructure and
Preservation Program
Library of Congress
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202-707-2603
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