BOF session Tokyo

The session was joined by a small group of five people from five countries (Canada, India, USA, UK, Germany) in competition to the parallel sessions of great interest. The members of the EEA network and other European Countries supported the idea of establishing an Environmental Interest Group (IG).

This small efficient group (including a Usage Board member) welcomed the idea of establishing an IG concerning environmental issues in DC and identified several items of interest for such an Environmental IG:

• to collect information on usage of DC in the environmental domain,
• to give guidance of the use of DC in the environmental domain,
• to install a forum for discussion of issues concerning DC with respect
• to environmental information resources,
• to develop an application profile for the environmental domain, based on DC
• to establish the representation of the environmental domain and their issues in DCMI (and vice versa?)
• ...

In the following discussion, the round table saw overlabs with already established Working Groups (WG), e.g. government, type, ontology, and agreed on engagement in such WGs not to double efforts in the same fields. One goal of the IG could be to look for flexible application profile, using already existing solutions instead of creating always new ones.

There are also DC elements worth to explore due to there strong relationship to the environmental sector. One such element which is mostly related to environmental issues is DC:coverage. Every environmental data is dealing with spatial coverage.

A first start should be to establish contacts and start a survey about the current 'metadata handling in the environment sector'

A subscription list for further interested fellows was filled by several conference participants. Overall there is a 'start' community about 50 members easily extendable by the EIONET network members.