I apologize for the multiple e-mailings—for some
reason, our mail merge is not sending the attachments through. You should now find
the agenda and introductory piece on metadata attached.
Dear Colleague,
You
are cordially invited to attend the upcoming meeting of the National
Infrastructure for Community Statistics (NICS) Community of Practice (CoP), to
be held from 8:45 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, November 2, 2005, at The
Brookings Institution in Washington,
D.C. This symposium, entitled “NICS and
Metadata: Joys, Sorrows, and Payoffs,” will explore how we can best manage the vitally important
metadata dimension of NICS. After a brief tutorial on the basics of metadata,
we will address the following questions: What metadata are essential for
NICS-ready data sets? What resources are available to help data providers
prepare these metadata as painlessly as possible? What resources are available
to help data users draw on metadata to integrate or compare data from multiple
data sets? How can NICS encourage the preparation and effective use of
metadata?
For
your information, attached please find the agenda for the November 2 meeting
and a short introduction to the wonderful world of metadata. The upcoming
gathering is the second meeting of the NICS CoP in our “initiation
phase.” The CoP will meet several times over the next year for the
purposes of education, information sharing, networking, receiving updates, and
furthering the development of NICS towards an “implementation
phase.”
NICS
is intended as a nationwide Web-based broker facilitating public and private
decisionmakers’ access to detailed, current community-level statistics
from thousands of local, state, federal, and commercial data sources. The NICS
CoP is comprised of over 150 individuals—from a variety of government,
nonprofit, and commercial realms—working collaboratively on the design,
construction, and governance of NICS.
We
hope that you, or a representative of your organization, will be able to
participate in the research symposium on November 2. A continental breakfast
and lunch will be provided. A
conference call option, with a live Web connection to presentations and
documents, is available if you are unable to attend in person. Please
RSVP by October 27 to Lisa Morales
at lmorales@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
or 202-797-6131 and let us know whether you plan to participate in person or by
conference call.
We
hope you will be able to join us in a discussion on this topic of great
importance to the development of NICS.
Sincerely yours,
Andrew Reamer
Deputy Director, Urban Markets Initiative, The Brookings
Institution
Andrew Reamer, Fellow and
Deputy Director
Urban Markets Initiative
The Brookings Institution
1775
Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20036
(202) 797-4398
areamer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
