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Hi all,
Tom makes an excellent point. Even within our own community, it is crucial
to establish and observe "conventions" for data encoding forms -- e.g. CF
conventions for netCDF. Of course it is even more important when we are
attempting to agree on international standard access protocols/interfaces.
My hope for GALEON is to develop a mechanism whereby we can establish and
evolve the conventions and protocol standards in tandem.
For those of you who are not from the meteorology community:
-- METAR is short for MEteorological Terminal *Aerodrome* Report ,
the WMO standard form in which surface weather station
observations are transmitted
-- RAOB is RAdiosonde (or sometimes RAwindsonde) OBservation,
the output of a vertical upper air atmospheric sounding
These are the fundamental, long-standing, in-situ observations of the
meteorological community. There are thousands of METAR, and hundreds of
RAOB, reporting stations around the globe. METAR stations produce reports
several times per hour whereas RAOBs are launched only once or twice per
day.
The METAR reports especially are important in many of the OGC and GEOSS demo
scenarios -- along with the weather forecast model output. And, as noted
earlier, the METAR observations are very similar in nature to ocean buoy
observations, river gaging station reports, air quality monitoring reports
and many others. So for interdisciplinary research projects and
operational scenarios where data from different sources must be integrated (
e.g. flood situtions or contaminant plume dispersion), it is absolutely
essential that we establish a common set of conventions and protocols in
order enable each community to access and understand the datasets from the
other communities.\
My own personal desire is to minimize rather than proliferate the number of
conventions and protocols needed to effect the useful exchange of data
between communities of practice.
-- Ben
On 7/23/07, Tom Whittaker <tomw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
One of the keys to success of NetCDF has been the community defining "conventions" that detail the structure of NetCDF files for certain types of data. To date, grids, METARS and RAOB data have well-defined and accepted community conventions. I believe it is in everyone's best interest to continue this approach and serve up data in NetCDF that adheres to these conventions. In addition, as extensions (new point data?) or new forms (satellite data?) are uncovered, community conventions should be quickly defined, with the understanding that the conventions will evolve (for example, CF conventions continue to evolve). Without these conventions, we face a continuation of the current state of anarchy that causes users to spend way too much time and energy "dealing with data formats" and not addressing the real issues. In fact, even when dealing with csv or xml, it is essential that the community establish conventions that prevent data providers from doing things like: a) not defining units, b) not specifying missing values, c) not making the files self-describing by specifying metadata in separate files, etc. (recently, I got a file with "station names" that required the use of an external file to locate these in space and time -- because the stations move). tom
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