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Hi Ben: I think this is also an argument that SOS, WFS and WCS be thought of as variations of one another - I think of a coverage server as a kind of WFS (even more so for SOS). Ron
From: Ben Domenico [mailto:bendomenico@xxxxxxxxx] Sent: May 8, 2007 9:54 AM To: Ron Lake Cc: Roy Mendelssohn; Unidata GALEON Subject: Re: OGC Ottawa TC meeting highlights Roy and Ron, Much of the earlier discussion was spawned by AGU talks by Andrew Woolf (on CSML "scientific feature types") and Simon Cox (on sampling feature classes -- among many other things). These bear a strong resemblance to John Caron's Common Data Model "scientific data types." For me, the use case that really makes this interesting is the collections of point/station observations over time that are common in atmospheric science (weather stations), oceanography (buoys, etc.), and hydrology(river gaging stations).It should be noted that work is currently underway to provide netCDF conventions for such observations. See: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf-java/formats/UnidataObsConve ntion.html Assuming the simplest case of a fixed set of observing stations taking measurements over time, one can argue that those are classic examples of "traditional" point FEATURES. On the other hand, if you view the collection as a whole as a "dataset," it has many similarities to the gridded datasets we normally think of as COVERAGES. It's just that, for the station observation collections, the locations of the points are completely irregular and are specified in a table of some sort rather than via a geometric algorithm or an indexed vector. Given such an observation convention for netCDF, this becomes an important issue in GALEON. Should such collections of station observations be delivered as coverages? Or should they be delivered via WFS or SOS? My answer to those questions is an emphatic "yes!" In other words, I don't see it as an either/or question. If the datasets are available via all three protocols, then the clients for all those protocols have access to the data. Moreover, from the server side, if we at Unidata use the THREDDS Data Server to provide the data as netCDF-encoded coverages via WCS, the experts in WFS and SOS can provide services that transform those datasets into the appropriate form for their client community. Using web services and standards in this manner, it means we can all focus on the components where we have the expertise. Isn't that the idea behind web services interoperability? -- Ben
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