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Hi Jon, all,My understanding of this issue is that the CRS should be identified by a URN but not necessarily a 'code' so your suggestion of resolving to a machine readable document is perfectly valid as long as that document has an identifier.
But one of the big problems with referencing other things in this way is that a URN can effectively refer to anything and there may not even be a resolver service at the other end (there might be a hard copy document!) - so ultimately I think your application needs to agree upon and understand the 'type' of URNs it is going to handle and deal with those. The benefits of using URNs of course are that somebody else does the work of defining 'things'.
OGC are investing time in URN development: http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogcnaBut that's not to say the CF community shouldn't also invest time in defining resolvable coordinate reference systems specific for our needs.
This does bring up the whole interoperability argument again though... :) I agree it is one of the main challenges for CF when it comes to OGC. Cheers, Dom On Thursday 09 October 2008 10:46:43 Jon Blower wrote:
Hi John, This is a serious general problem I think. In the case of parameterized projections you could express the projection in something GIS-friendly like WKT, but not all of these projections will have an EPSG code of course. (CRS identifiers don't need to be EPSG codes, one could come up with another authority, but that's not the real issue.) It is a real problem that there are an infinite number of CRSs but WxS expects the CRS to be identified by a code. Perhaps a WxS extension could use a resolvable URI as the code, which points to a document that describes the CRS in machine-readable form? We also have the problem of the "arbitrary" coordinate systems that can only be expressed through an exhaustive listing of the lat-lon points that comprise the grid. I think this is one of the main challenges for mapping CF-NetCDF to OGC. Cheers, Jon
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