GALEON and Other Outreach Progress Update

Ben Domenico, September 2009

GALEON Background:

One of the primary objectives of GALEON (Geo-interface to Air, Land, Earth, Ocean netCDF) is to establish standards-based protocols through which other communities can access datasets provided via Unidata technologies.?? Interactions with the Unidata 2013 review panel clarified that this allows Unidata to make data available to other groups (e.g., hydrology, societal impacts, hazards) without supplying the complete end-to-end support of analysis and display client applications as we do for our core user community.? One of the best examples of this is the GIS user community which uses the ESRI ArcGIS tools for the most part.? Given ESRI native support for netCDF files and for the Web Coverage Service (WCS) protocol of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), ArcGIS users can obtain our data via WCS and use the ESRI analysis and display tools of ArcGIS.? The IDL package from ITTvis is another example of a client application that can access netCDF data via WCS for analysis and display.? By influencing and supporting such international standard protocols, Unidata can serve data to these other groups without having to support their analysis and display applications.

The approach we are taking with the GALEON ?project is to establish a standards-based (Open Geospatial Consortium Web Coverage Service) interface to the THREDDS Data Server which includes THREDDS, netCDF, OPeNDAP services. Background documents are available:

• Overview and status update
  
• GALEON activity plan description
  
• Email discussion archive
  
• GALEON Team Wiki
  

 Phase 1

The most important development of GALEON Phase 1 was acceptance of the approach proposed for revising the binary encodings section of the WCS 1.1 specification.  The proposed changes make CF-netCDF one of the supported encoding formats.  The essence of the changes is provided in two documents.  The first summarizes the revised section of the spec itself:
  http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/projects/THREDDS/
GALEON/CF-netCDFprofile/WCS_1.1_draft_SupportedFormats.htm 

and the second is the draft WCS 1.1 application profile for encoding CF-netCDF. 
  http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/projects/THREDDS/
GALEON/CF-netCDFprofile/WCS-Encoding-Profile-For-CF-netCDFforPublic.htm

Phase 2

Last year, GALEON entered Phase 2.? Since that time, the GALEON wiki has been transferred to Google sites at: http://sites.google.com/site/galeonteam/

GALEON Phase 2 objectives center on

• implementing and testing WCS 1.1 clients and servers
  
• determining the relationships among alternative interfaces for delivering netCDF datasets (e.g. WFS or SOS)
  
• experimenting with other scientific data types (e.g. point/station observations, swath, radar radial, trajectory, etc.)
  
• incorporating OGC CS/W catalog services and a gateway to underlying THREDDS catalog services.
  
• GML issues related to ncML-GML, CSML, and perhaps GMPJPEG2000
  

OGC Technical Committee

As the official UCAR representative to the OGC Technical Committee, Unidata participates in 3-4 technical committee meetings per year to ensure that Unidata and UCAR needs are met in the emerging international standards. The most recent development is a plan to propose CF-netCDF as an OGC binary encoding stnadard.

http://sites.google.com/site/galeonteam/Home/plan-for-cf-netcdf-encoding-standard