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Hi Roy, You make very good points. In my effort to keep the use cases brief, I did not make it clear that the intention was for each one to represent a particular category or type of data. So to take your cases, if I understand the animal track environment example, I am guessing you are talking about an animal (perhaps a dolphin) that is instrumented to monitor some properties of its environment as it travels, . In my list, that would be an ocean equivalent of the trajectory case that's represented by the aircraft-borne observations. My thought is that, if we agree on a set of conventions for representing such trajectories, we can use it for observations along dolphin tracks, aircraft tracks, ship tracks, etc. One additional note is that, in all my cases, I emphasize that we should be prepared to address collections of such observations as well as individual ones. So I will find a way to make it clear that my proposed use cases are intended to be representative and and could be used for other cases that involve similar data types. Regarding the other case you mention of comparing present conditions with long term trends in a particular area, my idea is that those are just different space-time bounding boxes for the data collections in the region you are interested in. If you are talking about using observations from moored buoys in this case, it fits nicely with my proposed case for obtaining the station obs in the region around Paris. If you include CTD ocean soundings, it's equivalent to the Paris use case that includes atmospheric balloon soundings. You say you can deal with these cases in the netCDF/OPeNDAP world. My question is, if I define a region of interest in the ocean and a set of time bounds (short or long term) and then ask for all the observations from instrumented dolphins, what are the CF conventions that describe the netCDF that I get back? More specifically, how do I figure out where and when all those observations were taken? I would ask the same question regarding the station data in the upwelling region case you mention. What are the CF conventions that provide the information needed to figure out where and when the station (or buoy) data points were observed? Those are exactly the kinds of conventions John Caron is working on and where I think we need some consensus. If we come to agreement on those CF conventions, then we can propose the resulting CF-netCDF as a standard coverage encoding as a means of connecting our work with the formal standards community.. But, if you think we already have an explicit way to deal with these cases in the netCDF/OPeNDAP world, please let me know. Maybe there's a way to short cut the multi-step process I had envisioned. On the other hand, my next task is to revise my use cases to indicate that, while they are written as specific cases, they are intended to be representative of a family of cases for each of the data types. Hopefully I can do that without getting too wordy. -- Ben On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 10:37 AM, Roy Mendelssohn <Roy.Mendelssohn@xxxxxxxx>wrote:
Hi Ben: None of the use cases involve say getting long-time series for a region - or following an animal track's environment ( a "lagrangean" extract). The community I deal with needs to do these types of extracts, and it is precisely in these cases where I feel the OGC world has not really come to grips with. So the use case might be " I want to compare present conditions of the upwelling regions off of the western U.S. with historical long-term trends and season variations". It is exactly these use cases that I can do well with OpeNDAP/netcdf. -Roy
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