Below are a few excerpts from the current Unidata
Strategic Plan that highlight the importance of the
outreach activities summarized in this status update?
... to build infrastructure that makes it easy to integrate and use data from disparate geoscience disciplines
Data formats like netCDF, together with community-based data standards like the Climate and Forecast metadata convention and the Common Data Model are enhancing the widespread usability and interoperability of scientific datasets.
Advance geoscience data and metadata standards and conventions
... our experience shows us that robust solutions arise from community and collaborative efforts
... close partnerships and collaboration with geoscience data providers, tool developers, and other stakeholders, and the informed guidance of our governing committees
As part of Unidata's first training workshop on software development using Python, experimentation began with the Wakari cloud-hosted development environment. This work has continued since then but at a slower pace due to the departure of software engineer, Marcus Hermida. Since then, the work has been focused on the use of the community supported OWSlib tools for accessing data from OPeNDAP servers via a brokering layer that makes the data available via other standard interfaces, especially Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Coverage Serviced (WCS). If time allows, it will be good to fold in the work on ncSOS into this effort.
This work will continue as resources allow. To be honest, this project has been on the back burner recently.
The
ODIP (Ocean Data Interoperability Platform) is entering the third
and final year of the proposed work. Unidata's technologies
(especially THREDDS and netCDF) are part of the project and we
also maintain a liaison role and serve on the steering
team. Unidata has participated in the ODIP workshops
and steering team meetings and is helping to develop a proposal
for a second phase of the project. More details on ODIP, the
workshops and plans can be found at:
The CUAHSI HIS Standing Committee is roughly equivalent to the Unidata Strategic Advisory Committee (USAC). Jeff Weber and Ben Domenico participated in several teleconferences for this group and Ben attended the face to face meeting last month. As Unidata's Policy Committee in the past and more recently with USAC, there are difficult decisions about what to focus on in a era of limited resources.
Unidata continues an active role in the Discrete Continuous Building Block initiative led by the University of Texas.
From the project description:
Geoscience
information is defined on both discrete and continuous
spatial domains. Discrete
spatial domains include
point locations of observations at measurement sites and
GIS coverages of point, line and area features used for
observation and data interpretation. Continuous
spatial domains are
used in geophysical fluid sciences such as for the
atmosphere, oceans, and land subsurface to describe arrays
of measured or modeled variables defined on a mesh of
uniformly spaced points. Data defined on either
discrete or continuous spatial domains may
also vary discretely or continuously in time,
ranging from one-time samples, to samples at random points
of time, to samples at regularly spaced intervals of
time. This proposal builds upon previous work
called “Crossing the Digital Divide” focused on integrated
discovery of common information themes including
precipitation in discrete data from the CUAHSI
hydrologic information system and
continuous data from the Unidata
THREDDS data server.
This project will advance that work by investigating in
the first year creating
new technologies for publishing and discovery of
information through the Global
Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) Common
Infrastructure, the definition of a Common
Information Model for discrete and continuous data,
development of shared
software tools for
using this Common Information Model, and extension of the
concepts to similar information in the Polar,
Ocean and Solid Earth Sciences.
From the project description: