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Dear all, Another great discussion, thanks everyone. Particularly thanks to those (esp George) who have corrected my faulty understanding of features and coverages. Just when I think I've finally grasped all this OGC stuff, I find there's another level of complexity that's just beyond my reach... ;-) I must admit I still struggle greatly to see how all this stuff will translate into actual software. Further than this, I don't see how it will translate into *interoperable* software (i.e. independently-written clients and servers that can talk to each other properly). There seem to be way too many degrees of freedom. Assuming that I'm allowed to define my own feature types to describe absolutely any "thing" that I'm interested in, how can I expect a generic W*S server to correctly serve up my features and provide sensible subsetting facilities? I could write my own W*S variant to serve my features, but this seems to be missing the point. Sorry, maybe I'm slow but I still can't grasp how the "core plus extensions" model of WCS actually helps interoperability substantially. I sympathise with Peter Baumann - things were a lot simpler and more workable when we had the (more restrictive) view that "WCS is for raster data, WFS is for vector data". I could at least see how this translates to real software. Now I can't make the link at all. I think it's worth taking note of the WMS world at this point. WMS is a far simpler and more mature spec than WFS and WCS and has much greater backing from industry. Despite this I still have not found a WMS server or client that fully implements the 1.3.0 specification, particularly with respect to z and t axes (which are in the spec but often ignored, with servers doing horrible things like putting time information in the STYLES parameter). If we can only achieve partial success with WMS what hope is there for WFS and WCS, which are far more difficult, with far fewer interested parties? Regarding "unstructured" meshes - this is something that even the CF community has yet to solve properly. I think it's way to early to start folding this into the ISO Coverages world. I'm going to finish with a bald statement - I think the only hope for WCS is to restrict its scope. The scope can always expand later if the case is proven by real systems. Best wishes, Jon -- Dr Jon Blower Technical Director, Reading e-Science Centre Environmental Systems Science Centre University of Reading Harry Pitt Building, 3 Earley Gate Reading RG6 6AL. UK Tel: +44 (0)118 378 5213 Fax: +44 (0)118 378 6413 j.d.blower@xxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.nerc-essc.ac.uk/People/Staff/Blower_J.htm
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