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Well, it certainly is tempting to have a go at some of Roy's points (though I agree with a lot of them!). As someone who probably won't be at the next TC meeting (which is where?), I guess a question is whether the discussion should also take place beforehand, via email exchanges and the like. AGU seems like another place where a lot of interested parties would be collocated. So before we start the discussions (too late? :->), I am wondering if you'd like to set up a more formal communication channel of some sort, perhaps going beyond Galeon's mail list.... John On Sep 16, 2008, at 7:23 PM, Roy Mendelssohn wrote:
Hi Ben: I haven't had a chance to stir up a pot for awhile, so I couldn't resist on this one. Less on the abstract representation of coverages (sorry too old and too dumb, can barely understand word one of those things- I am still trying to grapple with the discussion from a couple of years ago that everything is a "feature", which implies if everything is then there is no discrimination power to the term and therefore has no functional meaning), but more on the idea that SOS, WFS, and the CDM say, for in situ data are all just different ways of representing the data. I would argue that they are not, and that there is a fundamental important difference. First, though this is a little glib, I don't think WFS has the data model for ocean observations, and most of what I have seen just shove the data into some WFS structure because you can. So I want to focus on SOS (SWE) and CDM. To my mind, SOS is a step backwards, because it puts the focus on the sensor, rather than on the ocean. For most of the GALEON community the focus is on the ocean, and in this case the 4D (5D if we count forecast time) ocean. I am not at all convinced, given some recent emails about WMS that I had, and some recent WCS decisions, that the OGC community understands nor is ready to embrace a 4-D ocean. Let me give an analogy. When an operation is going on in an operating room, there are all sorts of sensors connecting to the patient. yes, it is important, at times, to get the metadata for the sensor, in order to check it and calibrate and the like. But during the operation the key piece of information is the state of the patient, as can be put together from the different sensors, not the state of the sensors. SOS gives us the latter, while I would say GALEON's main concern is the state of the ocean, that is the former. The closest I have seen on the OGC world to the latter is CSML. Unfortunately, NOAA IOOS, at least as of now, did not decide to go with CSML. I would say rather than trying to harmonize apples and oranges, a failed enterprise from the start, let's work on harmonizing where the world view and data model share an underlying common viewpoint. -Roy putting on his asbestos jacket :-)
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