NOTE: The galeon mailing list is no longer active. The list archives are made available for historical reasons.
Hi Steve, First, thanks to you and Jon for your thoughtful emails. It will take me a while to digest them more fully and come up with a follow up to the discussion -- especially the OPeNDAP suggestions. But there is one point that's a bit puzzling to me. I agree with the view of "WCS as an OGC-accepted vehicle for interoperability *between* our community and others." But I don't see how it follows that "It is not clear that embedding netCDF into WCS any longer holds promise of contributing to that goal." To the contrary, my own sense is that great progress has been made toward that objective and Stefano's draft encoding specification gets us over the last remaining major hurdle. What have I missed here? -- Ben On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 12:02 PM, Steve Hankin <Steven.C.Hankin@xxxxxxxx>wrote:
All,
Jon has done an excellent job of expressing the fundamental concerns that I
also see. I ask your indulgence at for tossing yet-more radical ideas into
the ring.
It remains imperative that our "fluid earth science" community continue to
explore all useful angles of connection with the OGC community. The
contributions that GALEON has already made in this regard are enormous, and
from all that I have observed are very broadly recognized and appreciated.
For myself, I cannot thank you enough. Finding this much time and energy to
devote to community standards while also meeting "day job" demands is
extraordinary.
I would like to pose this question: is GALEON at a point where it should
take stock, re-evaluate goals, and possibly make a significant course
change? That is a very hard thing for an individual to do, and a much
harder thing for an organization to do. With the WCS 1.2 "core plus
extensions" approach, we have effectively seen the broader OGC community
reject involvement in the level of complexity that our community requires in
order to conduct its internal business. As Jon says, arguably the central
goal of GALEON *was* to explore WCS as an OGC-accepted vehicle for
interoperability *between* our community and others. It is not clear that
embedding netCDF into WCS any longer holds promise of contributing to that
goal.
If this interpretation of recent decisions is correct, then how should we
adapt? What approaches will best meet our community's needs? With the
combination of netCDF, CF, and OPeNDAP we have a powerful and effective
vehicle for interoperability that has already gained quite broad acceptance
within much of our community. The use of OGC-accepted solutions is,
however, mandated for many of our partners, and that has created a schism.
A true fusion of OPeNDAP and OGC could mend that schism and lead to a huge
interoperability success story for our community. How can we best blend the
virtues of netCDF/CF/OPeNDAP with the OGC process? Is there work that
GALEON could pursue to "bless" OPeNDAP transport under an OGC/WCS banner?
Can we envision, for example, a community extension to WCS that returns an
unconstrained OPeNDAP URL as the payload of a WCS data request? This would
essentially provide an OGC-accepted segue from WCS into OPeNDAP. With
relatively minor effort at relinking, any application that can read netCDF
can read OPeNDAP, so this is not far from what GALEON is currently exploring
using netCDF-CF files as a WCS payload.
And how to approach interoperability with users outside of our own
community? Jon's suggestion of "the WCS specification considerably
simplified" seems very sensible. And this approach would dovetail well with
the recent work on server-side regridding through OPeNDAP. It is easy to
envision OPeNDAP servers as gateways -- providing simple lat-long versions
of our gridded data that are then formatted as geoTIFF files and delivered
through the simplest WCS syntax.
2 cents (or maybe 4) - Steve
galeon archives: