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."
Brief 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.
Progress on OGC standardization
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. Recently, the OGC issued a press release
announcing three initial documents in the standardization process: an
overview primer, the core standard spec, and the binarry encoding spec.
http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/71
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.
After the public comment period and response to the comments, the
updated CF-netCDF standards document will be voted on by the OGC
Technical Committee as a whole. A positive vote by a majority of
the active OGC member organizations would establish CF-netCDF as a
formal OGC standard
September 2010 OGC Technical Committee Meeting Highlights
Below
is the powerpoint summary of the CF-netCDF Standards Working Group
session at last week's OpenGeospatial Consortium Technical Committee
meeting. The session was held Tuesday, 21 September 2010 11:00 – 13:00
- One (positive) comment so far from the RFC on the Core and Binary Encoding CF-netCDF Candidate Standards
- Note that CF governing committee has
been contacted regarding CF submission to OGC, modeled on NASA
SPG spec (Ben Domenico)
- Description of the CF extension to the netCDF core (Stefano Nativi)
- Description of the CF-netCDF encoding extension to WCS (Stefano)
- General Discussion
- No motions, no votes
The resulting SWG action items were:
- Follow up on suggestion to standardize vocabulary for some netCDF global variables.
- Investigate sending a copy of OGC CF-netCDF RFC to the CF-conventions mail list
- Check with HDF group to see if they are considering OGC standardization
- Investigate which version of CF addresses CRS/Datum issues
- Get the version numbers correct for all the standards being proposed and referenced in the CF-netCDF specs.
- Get OPeNDAP community input on mechanism proposed to deliver OPeNDAP URL as a proxy for a netCDF file
One other topic of special interest that
came up at the meeting is the fact that the stars are aligning for a
couple meetings in Colorado a year from now. UCAR/Unidata is
hosting the OGC Technical Committee meetings the week of September 19,
2011 in Boulder and the FOSS4G (Free and Open Source 4 Geosciences)
meetings and workshops are the week before (Sept 12) in Denver.
Both these meetings are of interest to many members of the
community and we have people involved in planning for both. In
addition, we could plan for a special presence at either or both
meetings or possibly could plan a "bridge" meeting/workshop of some
sort between the two.
Ongoing Outreach Activities
AccessData (formerly DLESE Data Services) Workshops
Unidata actively participated in this year's workshop in early
February at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. The overall
AccessData program is described at:
http://serc.carleton.edu/usingdata/accessdata/ and this year's workshop page is:
http://serc.carleton.edu/usingdata/accessdata/impacts/index.html. We
also hosted an AccessData PIs meeting at the UPC in August to plan the
writing publications describing the results of the project.
Spanning the Digital Divide
David Maidment has sparked a new initiative in our ongoing efforts to
coordinate our data systems with those of the hydrology community.
He describes it in an abstract for an invited paper at the Fall
AGU:
Hydrologic
information science requires several different kinds of information:
GIS coverages of water features of the land surface and subsurface;
time series of observations of streamflow, water quality, groundwater
levels and climate; and space-time arrays of weather, climate and
remotely sensed information. Increasingly, such information is being
published as web services, in standardized data structures that
transmit smoothly through the internet. A large "Digital Divide" exists
between the world of discrete spatial objects in GIS and associated
time series, and the world of continuous space-time arrays as is used
weather and climate science. In order to cross this divide, it should
be possible to search for quantities such as
“precipitation” and to find the information no matter
whether it comprises time series of precipitation at gage sites, or
space-time arrays of precipitation from Nexrad radar rainfall
measurements. This means that servers of discrete space-time hydrologic
data, such as the CUAHSI HydroServer, and servers of continuous
space-time weather and climate data, such as the Unidata THREDDS
server, should be able to be indexed in a unified manner that will
permit discovery of common information types across different classes
of information services. This paper will explore options for
accomplishing this goal using the CUAHSI HydroServer and the Unidata
THREDDS server as representative examples of information service
providers. Among the options to be explored is GI-cat, a federated,
standards-based catalog service developed at the Earth and Space
Science Informatics Laboratory of the University of Florence.
Thus far, the Unidata has been working 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.
Some of these efforts are described in the August Unidata E-letter:
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/newsletter/2010aug/index.html#Article1
Other Collaborations:
- NCAR GIS Program (official program of NCAR as of this year)
- Marine Metadata Interoperability Project Steering Team
- IOOS DMAC Steering Team
- CUAHSI Standing Committee
- OGC Oceans Interoperability Experiment sponsor
- UCAR wide representative to OGC Technical Committee
- AGU ESSI Focus Group Secretary
- ESIN Journal Editorial Board
- FOSS4G, Free and Open Source Software for Geosciences
- Liaison to OOI Cyberinfrastructure Project
- Possible collaboration with UCSD on a follow on NSF proposal for the Marine Metadata Interoperability (MMI) project.
Next Steps
The main items for the next several months are closing out the
AccessData project with the summary publication, completing the
OGC
CF-netCDF standardization process (hopefully by the end of the year)
and developing demonstrations of the viability of the standard working
with the OGC, the hydrology community and the NCAR GIS program..
A roadmap for the OGC CF-netCDF SWG is at:
http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=37335
