Project Oversight

An Alexandria Project Advisory Board will be appointed and given responsibility both for general project evaluation and for offering advice concerning the the goals, directions, and progress of the project. It will meet annually or semiannually to review all aspects of the project. Members of the Board will be appointed by the project's Executive Committee, and the Board will elect its own Chair. Terms of appointment will be for three years and staggered, because the project is already under way in limited form, and because we anticipate that it will continue beyond the requested period of NSF funding. Although members will be appointed by the Executive Committee, the Advisory Board will function as a largely independent review panel, and will be encouraged to share its findings directly with the project's sponsors.

We anticipate that the Advisory Board will consist of approximately 12 members, drawn from the following constituencies:

• prominent research specialists in the disciplines relevant to the project, including computer and information sciences;
• nationally prominent individuals from the library community, associated with such bodies as the ARL, Library of Congress, major university libraries, and major public libraries;
• individuals representing particular user groups, including educators, and government agencies or corporations with major spatial data holdings.
• prominent individuals from the spatial data community, including Federal spatial data producing agencies such as USGS, NASA, and NOAA; specialists in GIS or remote sensing; individuals from State and local governments; and individuals associated with the Federal Geographic Data Committee and the NRC Mapping Science Committee.

A Project Director will be appointed from among the project CO-PIs to take day-to-day responsibility for its operations. At this time, we anticipate that Smith and Goodchild will initially be named co-Directors. The Director, the CO-PIs (including the PI from SUNY at Buffalo) and the Director the UCSB Map and Imagery Laboratory will constitute an Executive Committee, to which the Director will be responsible. The committee will meet regularly, and its responsibilities include:

• appointment of members to the Alexandria Project Board;
• appointment of the project's Director and members of its Research and Development Committee;
• quarterly allocation of project resources on the basis of priorities established and recommended by the Science Committee;
• oversight of the design review process and prototype evaluation, including appointment of members of the Testbed Evaluation Team, and selection of test sites.