NOTE: The galeon mailing list is no longer active. The list archives are made available for historical reasons.
Dear Jon, I have been watching this discussing unfold over the last week, a relating back to use cases I am familiar with. Early discussions have asked "what is a WCS use case?" and also by implication "what is a WFS use case?" - indeed (IMHO) high level convergence between the variousOGC specifications is needed to address this.
My concern comes from the perspective of the coastal community and the
discussion on 'lowest common denominators' focussed on serving 2D
regular grids. Datasets based on 2D regular grids are increasingly
obsolete technology in the coastal community and so technology that does
not support serving unstructured meshes is unlikely to be adopted. The
typical coastal community has to deal with a range of coverage types;
single point time series, profiles, grids and meshes. I would argue
that the coastal community has requirement for simple 'bulk transport'
of data across a range of "coverages" - points, grids and meshes. Any
service that delivers this needs to support subsetting; but possibly not
coordinate conversion. The other requirement is for extensive metadata
about the measurements.
At this present time we deliver a single point timeseries coverage
through a WFS. It works, but certainly not scalable to other coverages.
However, it needs to be considered that really what I am being served is
a feature that describes the observation process {O&M / CSML territory),
plus the result of the observation as a bonus.
So in summary, agreement on what's in and out of scope for both WCS and
WFS is needed.
Keiran
-----Original Message----- From: galeon-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:galeon-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jon Blower Sent: 06 October 2008 08:50 To: Unidata GALEON Subject: Re: [galeon] WCS CF-netCDF profile document Hi all, Can I come at this from a slightly different angle - what is considered *out* of scope for WCS? It is often said that a successful business must be very clear about what it *doesn't* do (I saw it in a Dilbert cartoon so it must be true), and the same is surely true for standards. Back in the early days, WCS only dealt with 2-D rasters, reflecting its origins in satellite imagery. Although this was limiting (and highly unsuitable for some communities), it was at least implementable. Independently-developed clients and servers could interoperate. However, now it seems that nothing is out of scope for WCS. Furthermore, the ISO19123 Coverage model itself is also extremely general and it seems that pretty much any data can now be described as a Coverage, including what we might once have described as a "feature" (non-raster data). This considerably blurs the distinction between WCS, WFS and SOS. So, can people help me to understand what kinds of data would *not* be considered suitable for a WCS approach? Cheers, Jon
galeon archives: