Re: OGC tech committee meeting highlights

• To: Ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• Subject: Re: OGC tech committee meeting highlights
• From: "Glenn.Rutledge" <Glenn.Rutledge@xxxxxxxx>
• Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2006 12:30:50 -0400

Hi Ben,

Ben Domenico wrote the following on 7/7/2006 6:18 PM:

Hi,

GALEON participants who attended the OGC Technical Committee meeting in Edinburgh can add to (or correct) this brief summary of the meeting highlights from my GALEON perspective.

From the GALEON point of view, an important aspect of the meeting was the fact that there appears to be agreement on (or at least not a lot of vociferous opposition to) the approach we've proposed for revising the binary encodings part of the WCS 1.1 specification. As a reminder, the relevant proposed changes will 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 <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 <http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/projects/THREDDS/GALEON/CF-netCDFprofile/WCS-Encoding-Profile-For-CF-netCDFforPublic.htm>

According to the revised WCS under consideration, an application profile of this sort has to be approved by OGC for WCS encoding formats. Note that the draft of the CF-netCDF application profile is preceded by background information.

The OGC Technical Committee agreed to schedule an e-vote, "to begin on or before August 15," for adoption of 06-083r? as WCS 1.1.0. The OGC document 06-083 is the one that contains the changes that will make CF-netCDF one of the official encoding formats for WCS. In fact, it may be the only one with an associated application profile. Discussions are still underway on a few topics, but the WCS Revision Working Group will vote next week to stop accepting change requests for WCS 1.1.

There were many additional interesting discussions and presentations at the technical committee meetings, but I'll just mention two that may be of special interest to some members of the GALEON community. One is the fact that there is considerable interest in the OGC catalog specification (CS-W). I think this is very important for WCS and GALEON because the list of coverages returned in the WCS getCapabilities request is not adequate to represent all the information in THREDDS catalogs assciated with collections of netCDF datasets. Another very interesting presentation was given by Andrew Woolf describing a project getting underway at the UK NERC (Natural Environment Research Council). It involves bringing together GRID technologies for orchestrating services with OGC Web Processing Services (WCS) and computational services associated with OPeNDAP, e.g., the GDS (GRADS Data Server).

All in all -- a very productive meeting.  Enough for now.

-- Ben

--
Glenn K. Rutledge
Services Team Leader
Remote Sensing and Applications Division
NOMADS Project Manager
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
National Climatic Data Center
Asheville NC 28801
Phone: (828) 271-4097
Fax: (828) 271-4328

NOMADS: http://nomads.ncdc.noaa.gov/

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• References:
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    • From: Ben Domenico