Re: [galeon] WCS CF-netCDF profile document

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Are the "major GIS vendors" the key client builders?

Best - Simon


From: galeon-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [galeon-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jon Blower [jdb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, 25 September 2008 3:33 PM
To: John Caron
Cc: galeon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [galeon] WCS CF-netCDF profile document

Hi John and Galeon folk,

Excellent points.  Just a couple of comments:

So its important to acknowledge that WCS can bo things that opendap/netcdf cant.

This is true, although this alone isn't a justification to spend huge
effort designing and adopting a whole new protocol.  Modifying
existing protocols is another valid approach.  Also, users don't type
in WCS or OPeNDAP URLs manually - its done with a tool.  Of course,
this assumes we have CF-aware tools for every language, which we
don't, so pushing this to the server is attractive.

11. So can we use WCS to deliver data? Id say the current answer is "yes, but 
without clients, who cares?".

Agreed - and I'm not convinced that the major GIS vendors are going to
build good-quality clients in the foreseeable future.  I've talked to
a few GIS vendors informally and although they "buy" the WMS idea,
they are much less convinced about WCS, WFS and so forth.  They pay
lip service to these standards to give the appearance of being "open"
and "up with the game" but do not (yet) seem very interested in
committing.  This is probably partly due to conservatism and partly
scepticism but also because they have their own proprietary data
models and services that they want to keep pushing.  Have others had
different impressions of attitudes of GIS vendors?

I think the solution to the client problem is to keep things simple
and make it easy for client developers to do the right thing.  Then we
can make at least some progress.  Complexity can come later following
buy-in from users and software vendors.

Jon



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