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I *think* I understand what Ben means when he says OGC O&M "are so general they don't provide the detail needed..." : In and of themselves, SWE/O&M don't cover as written don't cover many semantic (and occasionally syntactic) details -- it is left to the user community to provide those specifics, the way OOSTethys did. (Is that what you mean?) NetCDF with CF provides a lot of that additional detail.
At the same time, I have to say that the CF-netCDF encoding was also insufficient for two of the communities I've dealt with. For one example, to my understanding the OceanSITES profile had to lay out a number of additional 'required attributes' for netCDF/CF to be sufficient to describe those sites' data sets. In the second case, a number of users with their own data sets found the CF vocabulary insufficient, and no suitable way to support additional vocabularies in the netCDF/CF context. (I want to submit a CF change request on this last point. As soon as I can figure out the right thing to request.)
I don't think this cuts against any of the rest of Ben's email, but I wanted to be clear that the topics addressed so far are necessary, but not sufficient, to provide community interoperability for most non- trivial communities. A sufficiently integrated semantic concept is also necessary to close the circuit.
John On Oct 8, 2008, at 3:44 PM, Ben Domenico wrote:
Another way to look at this is that the information models of ISO 19123 and the OGC O&M are indeed general enough at the conceptual level to encompass our data collections. *** However, they are so general that they don't provide the detail needed to ensure that our data is useful by other communities. On the other hand, WCS with CF- netCDF encoding has been shown to provide sufficient detail to enable a handful of clients and servers to interoperate with one another on a limited subset of the data collections in the GALEON community. ***
-------------- John Graybeal <mailto:graybeal@xxxxxxxxx> -- 831-775-1956 Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute Marine Metadata Interoperability Project: http://marinemetadata.org
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