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Hi, Below is a list of personal observations and highlights from the Ottawa OGC technical committee meeting. I hope other GALEON participants who attended the meeting will complement this with their additions. -- Ben =================================================================================== **The meeting was not as well attended by GALEON participants as some OGC meetings -- partly because several GALEON participants were at the European Geophysical Union meetings in Vienna. But a strong GALEON core was present and GALEON presentations were given in the Earth Observations session in addition to the usual presentation in the Coverages session where Peter Baumann was voted in as co-chair of the Coverages Working Group. There were discussions about common classifications of data types that stemmed from presentations at the Fall AGU meeting and a followup meeting at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. These discussions were spawned by the realization that there are strong similarities and overlap among: - BADC: scientific feature types, a part of their Climate Sciences Modelling Language - OGC Observations & Measurements: sampling feature types spearheaded by CSIRO - Unidata's CDM (Common Data Model): scientific data types These commonalities are leading to a possible clarification of the relationship among SOS (sensor observation service), WFS (Web Feature Service) and WCS (Web Coverage Service). For GALEON, a key element of this is the fact that binary encoding of the payload as CF-netCDF coverages might work within the WFS and SOS protocols as well as for WCS. The underlying unifying concept is that a "coverage" is in fact a special case of a "feature" and ncML-GML and CSML dialects of GML can provide the needed "wrapper." So far GALEON focused on gridded data, but strong interest continues to be voiced in providing point/station datasets using the same protocols. To foster movement in that direction, it would be necessary to clearly define the CF-netCDF for point/station dataset collections and get it blessed as a CF convention. There seems to be a growing consensus that this would fit with the ISO 19123 standard for coverages. An OGC-wide discussion of more general coordinate systems specifications ( e.g. the met community's use of atmospheric pressure as the vertical coordinate) are issues that go beyond the context of the GALEON Web Coverage Services in some of the issues arose. There was increased activity among other GEO disciplines, e.g., the Ocean Sciences Interoperability Experiment; CUAHSI (Consortium for Advancement of Hydrological Sciences, Inc gave a presentation describing "WaterML." There were several discussion relating to the OGC TC meeting the week of the September 17 that will be hosted at Undiata/NCAR where it would be good to have a special demo day on Friday and possible sessions during the TC meetings themselves on GALEON related topics such as earth observations and so forth.
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