1e.
Is the UPC prepared to provide the same
quality of support to the newly engaged
communities as it provides to its current
constituents?
While the support for all
users will remain at a very high level, that does not mean
it will be exactly the same. For example, for
the core community Unidata provides
comprehensive support for a full suite of tools from data
services, through decoders, to complete analysis
and display packages. For other cases, the
tools that are
specialized to their community may not
be available via and supported by the UPC. One example
of this is the community of users of GIS
tools. In that case Unidata supports standards-based
web services that make our datasets available in such a way
that tools that incorporate those standard interfaces can
avail themselves of Unidata datasets. Thus these
new communities can continue to make use of the
analysis and display tools they are familiar with while
taking advantage of the data services of the traditional
Unidata community.
Excerpt from the proposal review panel report
Advocacy for Community
Standards: "In particular, the UPC could play a
significant leadership role within committees and
consortiums like OGC seeking to address the need to develop
standards and technologies for data discovery. Unidata
leadership and advocacy in this area could facilitate
expanded utilization of Unidata information resources
for other research areas like climate and provide
Unidata users with easier access to other data sources
like NASA satellite information. However, the OGC
letter of recommendation in the proposal and the
Unidata responses to the review panel questions
regarding cyberinfrastructure did demonstrate that the
Unidata was actively involved in community discussion
of interface and data standards."
Summary
of Recent Progress
Background on netCDF and CF formal standards efforts
Following on the success of Russ Rew and the netCDF team in
establishing netCDF and CF as NASA standards, efforts
continue to have CF-netCDF recognized internationally by
the Opengeospatial Consortium (OGC) as standards for
encoding georeferenced data in binary form.
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
overall plan and status is maintainted at http://sites.google.com/site/galeonteam/Home/plan-for-cf-netcdf-encoding-standard. In
keeping with the proposal and review panel
recommendations, the goal of this effort is to
encourage broader use of Unidata's data by fostering
greater interoperability among clients and servers
interchanging data in binary form. Establishing
CF-netCDF as an OGC standard for binary encoding will
make it possible to incorporate standard delivery of
data in binary form via several OGC protocols, e.g.,
Web Coverage Service (WCS), Web Feature Service (WFS),
and Sensor Observation Service (SOS). For over a
year, the OGC WCS SWG is already developing an
extension to the core WCS for delivery of data encoded
in CF-netCDF. This independent CF-netCDF
standards effort is complementary to that in WCS and
hopefully will facilitate similar extensions for other
standard protocols.
Progress on OGC standardization
In
January 2011, the OGC Technical Committee voted to adopt
the netCDF Classic as an official OGC binary encoding
standard. As of the writing of this
report, the final standard specifications are being formatted
for final publications, but the draft standards are still
available in three documents:
an
overview primer, the core standard spec, and the
binary encoding spec. The standards
documents are available at
http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/netcdf
In addition, extension specifications for the netCDF core
standard have been drafted for the netCDF enhanced (netCDF4)
data model, the CF conventions and for the CF-netCDF extension
to the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS). These draft
documents are available at
https://portal.opengeospatial.org/index.php?m=projects&a=view&project_id=82&tab=2&artifact_id=45016
The week of September 19, Unidata hosted the meetings of the
OGC Technical Committee and Global Earth Observation System of
Systems (GEOSS) meetings. The participation (~360)
at these meetings exceeded the previous record by nearly
50%. Unidata's efforts continued with presentations on
the enhanced data model and CF conventions extensions to the
core netCDF data model standard. In addition our
experimentation with the use of web brokering services
(namely, GI-cat from the U of Florence ESSI Labs)
infrastructure to establish data search capabilities for
THREDDS server was highlighted in the Met/Ocean/Hydro water
cycle summit.
Ongoing
Outreach Activities
AccessData (formerly DLESE Data Services) Workshops
The overall AccessData program is described at:
http://serc.carleton.edu/usingdata/accessdata/ and the most
recent workshop page is:
http://serc.carleton.edu/usingdata/accessdata/impacts/index.html. The
AccessData team is now working on several publications to
document the results of the project.
One of the resulting publications was the winner of a AAAS
Science Prize for
Online Resources in Education (SPORE). The essay
"Making Earth Science Data Accessible and Usable in Eduction"
is available in the online version of
Science
at:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6051/1838.full.pdf
Data Discovery Initiatives
In
keeping with the Unidata 2013 Proposal review panel
recommendation relating to collaborating with others to
enhance the available data discovery facilities, the UPC
and the Unidata community are following up on earlier
collaborations with George Mason University and
NASA. The most recent work is with the U of Florence
ESSI Labs team to use their tools to harvest search
metadata from THREDDS data servers which can provide
special challenges because of the size and volatility of
their holdings. A new release of the ESSI Labs GI-cat
package has addressed limitation of earlier versions which
ran into difficulty with the Unidata Motherlode THREDDS
server. Members of our community are finding this
tool useful enough that Rich Signell has created a YouTube
video on "How to Configure GI-CAT for the
first time": http://youtu.be/28biJHTQSrM.
This work was described in an invited paper with David
Maidment as the lead author at the Fall 2010 AGU and
another presentation
on the topic was given at the Water Cycle Summit held
in conjunction with the OGC Technical Committee
meetings at UCAR.
This work continued through the summer with a visiting
graduate student, Avirup Gupta from Utah State
University. There is also a group coalescing
to propose web brokering services such as GI-cat as a part of
the NSF EarthCube.
Other Collaborations:
- NCAR
GIS Program
- Marine
Metadata Interoperability (MMI) Project Steering Team
- IOOS
DMAC Steering Team
- CUAHSI
Standing Committee
- UCAR
wide representative to OGC Technical Committee
- AGU
ESSI Focus Group Board
- ESIN
Journal Editorial Board
- Host
for OGC Technical Committee Meeting September 2011
- Liaison
to OOI Cyberinfrastructure Project
- Several
possible collaborations with EarthCube teams
- Possible
collaboration with European Commission team on
proposal with NSF funding for Unidata
Planned
Activities
The next steps in the
CF-netCDF standardization effort were noted above.
This will be coordinated with OPeNDAP, Inc who recently
joined the OGC as a voting member of the Technical
Committee and with the HDF group who sent two
participants to the September OGC meetings but have not
yet formally joined the OG.
After the last policy committee meeting, I created a
white paper based on my "Data Interactive Publications"
presentation which seemed to be well received.
It's available at
https://sites.google.com/site/datainteractivepublications/home/white-paper-on-data-interactive-publications
along with several simple examples. This may form
the basis of a white paper for EarthCube submitted in
conjunction with the OGC. So far, interest in the
concept in the EarthCube community has come from:
- Amy Apon, Chair of Computer Science Division at
Clemson University
- Ian Foster, Distinguished Fellow at Argonne, "father
of the grid."
- Siri Jodha Khalsa, Research Scientist at NSIDC
- Erik Franklin, Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology
Relevant
Metrics
- One
co-authored essay in Science
-
The list of "other collaborations above
includes a dozen organizations we have regular
interactions with. In most cases, our
interactions are as representatives of our
community on their steering or policy groups,
so we have at least some voice in their
direction.
-
Over the years of these standardization
efforts, ESRI has incorporated the netCDF
among the input and output formats that their
arcGIS tools work with directly. This
represents a user community that numbers in
the millions, but it isn't possible for us to
measure how many of those users now use it to
access our data.
-
The standards efforts enable us to collaborate
on an ongoing basis with dozens of
international organizations -- especially
those represented in the OGC MetOceans, Earth
System Science, and Hydrology Domain Working
Groups.
