Steering committee terms of reference and meeting minutes

The latest steering committee minutes are available along with a first version of their terms of reference. Forthcoming soon will be an Implementation Plan and terms of reference for sub-groups. This may all seem incredibly boring (and it generally is) but it is also absolutely necessary for the initiative to function properly if it is to be a successful multi-person, multi-institution, multi-year effort. Comments welcome as always.

Prototype for the databank publicly available

A very initial version of the envisaged global surface databank is available from http://www.gosic.org/GLOBAL_SURFACE_DATABANK/GBD.html. It should be stressed that this is in the very early stages of development. A full version release is not expected until early to mid 2012. This allows time to harvest additional data sources, reprocess, merge, and add provenance information so that it represents a significant delta from what has gone before in terms of both completeness and fundamental scientific value. Comments are welcome here but would be more appropriate at the new databank blog.

Two new initiative related blogs

There are two new more working level blogs that have been set up recently. These are more technical discussion areas than this blog. Both allow working group members to add posts and comments (moderated) are allowed from anybody else.

http://globalsurfacedatabank.blogspot.com/ covers work towards a global surface databank. If you know of data sources please head on over and provide leads in the post comments.

http://surftempbenchmarking.blogspot.com/ covers work towards a set of benchmark analogs to the databank that algorithm creators can run their algorithms on to ascertain both absolute and relative performance.