Hi Ben and all,
Thank you for the good summary of our meeting.
You definitively captured and reported the important points.
I would like only to add that GEOSS and GCI
(GEOSS Common Infrastructure) communities are
very interested in the netCDF standardization and
the WCS extension specification for netCDF-CF.
--Stefano
Hi all,
The OGC Technical Committee meetings and the
follow up with our colleagues at the University
of Florence were very enjoyable and
productive. Below is a brief summary of the highlights.
I hope Stefano and others who were part of these
meetings will add to this brief summary and correct any errors.
-- Ben
============================================================================
OGC Technical Committee Meetings
For us, the most relevant session was the
CF-netCDF Standards Working Group Session. The meeting folder is available at
<http://portal.opengeospatial.org/index.php?m=projects&a=view&project_id=82&tab=2&artifact_id=37917>http://portal.opengeospatial.org/index.php?m=projects&a=view&project_id=82&tab=2&artifact_id=37917
The status update part of the meeting basically
went over the difficulties we've run into with
initial efforts to draft OGC encoding standards
for the netCDF core and CF
conventions. Basically what this comes down to
is that we are working in the problematic area
where the top-down approach of ISO and the OGC
come together with the bottom up standards and
conventions that have evolved in our community
of practice over the last couple decades of CF
and netCDF development. In retrospect, it
should probably not have been surprising that
mismatches between the two approaches would bring to light some mismatches.
On the positive side of the ledger, Stefano
provided a very enlightening presentation on
what we have learned from the experience:
Discussion of the CF-netCDF Data Model Standardization
<http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=38337>http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=38337
The main points in the discussion were:
?Initial attempts at CF-netCDF standardization
have been very useful ? as a learning experience
?We need a common understanding of:
? conceptual data model, community profile model, application model,
?canonical encodings
?specification targets, conformance classes and related conformance tests
?Special challenges:
?We are bringing together top down ISO/OGC with bottom up community standards
?This is the first OGC attempt at abinary encoding specification
?We will be among the first to use modular encoding spec (OGC 08-13)1r3
As it turns out, the WCS SWG has come up with a
draft of WCS 2.0 which has been cited as an
ideal example the new modular encoding spec., so
we now have a good model to work with. In the
end the sense of those present at the meeting is
that we should attempt to use the new encoding
spec, but also keep the CF-netCDF specs the same
as those of NASA as much as possible.
The MetOceans Domain Working Group continued the
lively discussions of topics that have arisen in
telecons. the presentations and summaries are available at:
<http://portal.opengeospatial.org/index.php?m=projects&a=view&project_id=82&tab=2&artifact_id=37420>http://portal.opengeospatial.org/index.php?m=projects&a=view&project_id=82&tab=2&artifact_id=37420
And in the Metadata DWG, Ted Habermann gave a
presentation on "NetCDF Meets ISO" which
outlined a process for enhancing netCDF files
and TDSs with metadata useful in discovery systems as well as use metadata.
<http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=38472>http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=38472
Meetings with the Earth and Space Sciences
Informatics group at the University of Florence
Much of the discussion centered on the details
of how to create OGC standards for CF-netCDF
that incorporate the bulk of the NASA versions,
but still meet the requirements of the OGC
modular specs. Also it seems sensible to work
in parallel on the CF-netCDF encoding extension
for WCS 2.0 and the independent CF-netCDF
encoding spec. That way the WCS extension can
point to the independent CF-netCDF specification.
We also went over common areas of interest
because of Unidata's goal of outreach into
climate science. The U of Florence is very
active in the GEOSS climate change and
biodiversity focus area. Recent interactions
with the MetOceans and the NCAR GIS project have
turned up possible areas of collaboration among
those groups, visiting scientists to NCAR, and
the nascent NOAA Climage Service
initiative. We agreed to follow up on those possibilities.
Finally, the ESSI team gave an enlightening
demonstration of their GI-cat distributed catalog services package
<http://zeus.pin.unifi.it/cgi-bin/twiki/view/GIcat>http://zeus.pin.unifi.it/cgi-bin/twiki/view/GIcat
Among the many capabilities of GI-cat, it can
provide a search service for datasets stored in
THREDDS Data Servers. It may be of interest to
our community as an additional tool for sites that are implementing TDSs.
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