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HI Simon: I am not sure I agree - in that one could determine the nature of the domain by inspection of the schema in any event - however I agree that spatial-temporal coverages have some operators that might not apply in general - not sure I can think of any for spatial - but I am sure there are some that at least would be more abstract . We can do netCDF over spatial-temporal domains now and I think in the context of GML in JPEG 2000 this is a valid first step. Hopefully the generalizations done to handle more abstract (i.e. non-spatial) domains can then done as extensions of what exists in GML now. Respecting observations - it is about the collection of things that could be in themselves coverages (e.g. take a photograph) or as you note construct a coverage on aggregation - of course not all coverages arise from observations - they could come just from simulation or an analytical model. Cheers Ron
Sent: May 13, 2005 6:46 PM Yes again - Coverage is clearly a restriction of a more generalised parent, perhaps starting at "Function". However, the restriction to spatio-temporal domains is useful. This is a special, frequently-occuring subtype of the general concept, that is important enough in GIS to warrant its own name. There are certain operations that apply to coverages that do not apply to the parent classes, and it is useful to have things classified in this way to allow these operations to be available. So, I think we do need a more general class, but we should also retain "coverage". netCDF is related to the parent of coverage, and JP2K relates to a restriction of coverage. And the Observation model relates to metadata about the estimate of values in the range. Simon
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