Re: [galeon] WCS CF-netCDF profile document

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The "Environmental Data Connector" was developed because ArcGIS is in heavy use in NOAA/NMFS and NOAA/NOS and there was a demand for being able to easily input satellite data into ArcGIS. Not my tool of choice, but that of many of our customers, and since we are not geting a $700Billion bailout, we listen to our customers.

Same reason we have WCS through THREDDS (for a vast array of data), though at present it is hardly used.

-Roy


On Sep 25, 2008, at 7:46 AM, Jon Blower wrote:

Hi Simon,

My original contention was that the primary use case for WCS in our
community is to communicate metocean data to *other* communities.  The
metocean community already has tools and protocols for working with 4D
data.  I do not see metocean scientists adopting commercial GIS tools
for doing their everyday science work, just as you say that "serious"
geoscience users don't use them for solid earth applications.  I don't
see much value in adapting the existing metocean tools to use WCS when
they already work very well with OPeNDAP.  (Although I'm slowly coming
around to the idea that WCS might be a useful way to share standard
*metadata* about metocean coverages for cataloguing and discovery
purposes.)

I can, however, see GIS tools and protocols being used to access
metocean data by non-metocean specialists.  Some of these users are
desperate to get hold of metocean data but don't want to get to grips
with the technical complexity, and they probably won't use tools
designed for metocean scientists.  I'll give two examples, taken from
real work done in (or with) my department:

1) A volcanologist needs a column-integrated water vapour field to
correct Synthetic Aperture Radar retrievals over a deforming volcano.
2) A coastguard needs forecasts of surface winds and surface ocean
currents to drive an oil spill model, or to direct search-and-rescue
operations.

This is a limited view only of course, but this is why I'm concerned
about adoption by commercial GIS developers, rather than the metocean
community.  The user in case (1) uses a well-known GIS package.  In
case (2) I'm not 100% sure if the GIS package is COTS or developed
in-house.  Neither of these users wants or needs metocean data in its
full complexity: (a) they only need 2D fields (in fact I see very
little demand for 3D metocean fields outside science and aviation);
(b) they don't need to know the original grid of the data: a
reprojection into lat-lon space would do fine.  In other words, we can
satisfy these use cases (and many others probably) with a simplified
version of a WCS (maybe this is what WCS1.2 "core" will do for us).
(I also note that the time dimension is very important in both cases,
which is a current limitation of many GIS systems.)

This is of course only my view from where I'm sitting.

Cheers, Jon




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