NOTE: The galeon mailing list is no longer active. The list archives are made available for historical reasons.
Hello Jon, Roy, John, Ben, and all, it's exciting to follow this discussion here. For documentation and consolidation, would it be possible to somehow cast all these valuable facets into the use case page @ GALEON? thanks a lot, Peter Jon Blower wrote:
Hi Roy, You are quite right of course that subsetting servers are important to scientists (I did say that I was generalizing!) I was trying to highlight that "dumb" servers have their advantages because scientists can trust that they haven't manipulated the data. OPeNDAP I guess falls somewhere between the "dumb" (e.g. Apache) and "smart" servers (e.g. WCS) because it does basic subsetting in index space and hence its output is predictable - it behaves exactly as if the users have done the subsetting locally with no other manipulation and hence is pretty trustworthy. I don't want to suggest for a moment that server-side subsetting isn't important (we use OPeNDAP every day too) but scientists tell me all the time that "we just need the data". Again, I just wanted to say that "how" something is done is just as important to use case analysis as "what" is done. Regarding John G's point about sensors - I'm afraid I don't know anything about sensors but I guess all data is processed somewhat before publication: even model results are often translated to a different format (e.g. Met Office PP format to NetCDF). I think the point is that scientists often feel most comfortable getting data from as close to the original source as possible, as the data providers intended it. Cheers, Jon
galeon archives: