NOTE: The galeon mailing list is no longer active. The list archives are made available for historical reasons.
The issue is that each specification (and combination of core/extension specs) applies to both clients and servers simultaneously. That is, some spec combination X which states "a server may offer A or B or C" translates into "a client must be prepared to handle A and B and C". This is the only way that a client really can upfront (ie: before a GetCoverage response is received) decide whether it can talk to this server or not. This is one of our curses: Every "should" in the specification, every "may", every "if...else" multiplies the property space.) more inline... Aaron Braeckel wrote:
Renamed thread per Ben's suggestion. If a 2D client talks to a 4D server, it has to be able to detect that the WCS is beyond its capabilities but otherwise I'm not sure that much additional complexity is imposed on clients. A process for describing the dimensionality of the server is definitely important with an N-dimensional WCS, but I think this is already largely covered by the CRS description in the current WCS specification. I see it as another flexible point in the specification. Just as the WCS does not mandate any particular encoding format or specific CRS/data projection, it would not mandate the dimensionality of the data. As in cases where an unknown CRS is in use by a WCS server, a client makes a decision about whether it is capable of handling that WCS implementation.The reason I see N-dimensionality as preferable to a restricteddimensionality is that the restriction: -forces non-2D WCS implementors to fulfill a more complicated extension, even when simple core functionality is all that is needed -increases the number of necessary extensions, at least with how the current extensions are described and laid out. Minimizing the number of extensions seems beneficial to interoperability overall -seems to cut the WCS functionality into groupings at a different angle than the general coverage concept (i.e. less generalized coverage capability) Are there cases I am forgetting that might cause problems for 2D implementors?
well, just think about 3-D image pyramids as the analogy to the well-known map navigation accelerator. Also tiling gets a new quality. -Peter
galeon archives: