Progress Report for GALEON and Other Outreach Activities

Ben Domenico
October 2007

Highlight Summary of the July OGC Technical Committee meetings from a Unidata perspective.

Ben's status update on GALEON in the Coverages session generated considerable discussion, but it still does not seem that there are many implementations of WCS (Web Coverage Server) 1.1 for interoperability testing. Much of the discussion related to the use of WCS or other protocols (especially Web Feature Service and Sensor Observation Service) for the kinds of data we are serving via our THREDDS Data Server (including the WCS 1.0 interface) and especially for the other types of data we are starting to make available via the THREDDS Data Server. This is especially true in the case of station observations. The participants in the Ocean Sciences Interoperability want to include tests of these alternatives among their experiments.

The OGC University interest group is becoming more active and Gerry Creager mentioned the possibility of a special session for that group at the Boulder OGC tech committee meeting the week of September 17. Subsequently, a decision was made to postpone this special meeting for a later date.

There was also quite a bit of online and offline discussion about the September meeting which Unidata/NCAR are cohosting with the ITT Visualization Group (the IDL folks formerly known as RSI). The OGC tech committee will meeting Monday through Thursday and there will be a special GEOSS (Global Earth Observation System of Systems) workshop all day Friday and Saturday morning. A special Interoperability Day session is scheduled of all day Wednesday, Sept 19.

The GEOSS workshop is Friday and Saturday Sept 21 - 22: http://www.opengeospatial.org/event/070921workshop

Our Interoperability Day is Wed Sept 19: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/events/2007InteroperabilityDay/

Both are open to the public.

Presentations of Interoperability Day at the OGC meetings are here.

The OGC Technical Committee meetings are Monday through Thursday and require OGC membership or special permission and registration: http://www.opengeospatial.org/event/0709tc

GEOSS continues to be a topic of interest for the OGC members and a number of them (many GALEON participants including Stefano and Rudy) are working on elements of the use case demonstrations that GEOSS is developing. The datasets on our motherlode TDS/WCS may be a component of some of these use case demonstrations.

One last note is that there is a move afoot to "harmonize" the GRID and OGC Web Services protocols.
At the OGC university group meeting, Craig Lee mentioned that there will be a special effort at the October OGF (Open Grid Forum) meeting in Seattle
http://www.ogf.org/OGF21/events_ogf21.php. There is an effort to come up with an MOU between the OGF and OGC to harmonize their work on web processing services if possible. A couple participants in this effort have some familiarity with LEAD and especially with the LEAD folks at Indiana.

Olga Wilhelmi's Summary of the NSF meeting to discuss the CoAHP (Collaborative Atmosphere Hydrology Project) proposal

I just returned from NSF where we had two days of meetings with program officers from ATM, hydrology, water engineering, and biological sciences regarding our Co-AHP proposal, and wanted to give you an update about the status of the proposal and the next steps.

If you remember, the proposal was submitted to NSF Hydrology program. It was reviewed positively but the reviewers thought that the proposal was too large for hydrology alone (both in scope and funding level) and that the idea we were proposing can go beyond the hydrological sciences and potentially can be relevant for ecology, biogeochemistry and perhaps for societal impacts. So the hydrology program officer circulated our proposal among his NSF colleagues in different directorates and organized a series of meetings where myself, Rick Hooper and Larry Winter (NCAR deputy director) presented and discussed the project.

My impression from these meetings is that overall the proposal was well received by NSF. There is an in interest in funding our work (with FY08 funds) from hydrology, biological sciences and potentially other NSF programs, but with two main requirements: 1) we need to provide a management plan for long-term community support and sustainability of the services, and 2) we need to get a somewhat formal stamp of approval from hydrological and biological communities that these data and services are indeed needed. This can be done by the means of a workshop: relatively small with about three representatives from each community. We can think of these people as potential project's advisory panel members. NSF will fund this workshop; and we can conduct it at NCAR sometime in the next couple of month (depending on how quickly we get funding for it). The workshop will also help us to provide NSF with a new realistic budget. Adding capabilities to serve new communities (beyond hydrology) may affect the scope of work and the project's budget.

So I see the next steps and a time line as:

So, my overall impression is that even though we have not seen the funding for the project yet, there is still an opportunity for the Co-AHP to get funded and an even more exciting opportunity to bridge atmospheric science with several new communities. But because we are crossing disciplinary boundaries, it takes time to get this activity going... So thanks for your patience.

Proposals not funded:

Proposal led by the ESIP Federation to NSF NSDL Pathways opportunity was unsuccessful

Proposal led by GMU to NSF Collaborative Research: II (GEO): Enabling Choreographed Web Services for Earth System Science (CHOICES)-Improving Interdisciplinary Information Sharing

Proposals for which we provided Unidata letters of Support/Commitment:

Proposal entitled "The Open Geospatial Interoperability Network " led by Texas A&M and OGC Interoperability Institute to NSF Community-based Data Interoperability Networks solicitation (NSF-07-565)

Proposal entitled "A GEOSS Higher Education Portal" in response to the NSF CI-TEAM solicitation.

Update on the September 19 Unidata OGC Interoperability Day

The agenda is at: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/events/2007InteroperabilityDay/agenda.html

Meeting presentations are at: : http://galeon-wcs.jot.com/WikiHome/GALEON Phase2 Main Page/Unidata OGC Interoperabilty Day Presentations

To view the Interoperability Day webcast: