[galeon] June OGC TC Meeting Highlights

• To: Unidata GALEON <galeon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Unidata Staff <staff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, NCAR GIS <ncargis@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Subject: [galeon] June OGC TC Meeting Highlights
• From: Ben Domenico <Ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Wed, 1 Jul 2009 15:28:55 -0600

These are a few of the highlights of last week's OGC (Open Geospatial
Consortium) Technical Committee (TC) meetings -- from our perspective.
-- The meteorology community (including liaisons with the WMO and NOAA) are
participating in an increasingly active role in the OGC TC.   This marked
the second meeting of the Meteorology Domain Working Group (DWG now
co-chaired by Chris Little of the UK Met Office and Marie Francoise Voidrot
 of Meteo France).  The primary technological focus still seems to be on
WMS, but there were increasing calls for expanding that in the future.  The
meeting agenda and presentations are available at:


http://external.opengis.org/twiki_public/bin/view/MeteoDWG/AgendaAndSlides200906

One other item of note is that some members of the Met DWG, including me,
think it should include Oceanography as well, but that decision was put off
until the next TC meeting.  So we continue with separate Hydrology and Met
working groups and the Earth System Science (ESS) DWG as a group where
integrated cross-disciplinary issues can be addressed.  Efforts are made to
avoid scheduling conflicts among these groups.

Issues relating to Coordinate Reference Systems (CRS) came up in the WCS
Standard Working Group (SWG) session as well as in the CRS DWG meetings.
 For our community an interesting aspect of this are discussions of "image"
CRSs.   In essence, an image CRS is index-based which, to my way of
thinking, has some strong conceptual similarities to the way we work with
coordinate system information in netCDF and OPeNDAP.   And, as with our
work, the challenge is to come up with a formal description of how the index
space relates to other index spaces or (heaven forfend) the real world.  In
any case, I believe the basic netCDF data model is ideal for dealing with an
"image CRS."

My main concern at this meeting was to get a sense of the reaction to the
idea of proposing CF-netCDF as an OGC binary encoding standard separate from
and data access standard such as WFS, WCS, or SOS.  I gave presentations on
the subject in both the ESS and Coverages DWGs.  To be honest, there was not
a strong response one way or the other, but all the comments I received in
the meetings and in the hallways were quite positive.  I put together one
set of slides for the two presentations and hid different slides for the two
audiences.  A copy of the slides can be obtained at:


http://portal.opengeospatial.org/index.php?m=projects&a=view&project_id=82&tab=2&artifact_id=33438

It's important to keep in mind that we intend to continue efforts to have
CF-netCDF binary encoding established as a standard extension to WCS, so
these initiatives will continue in parallel even though there is obviously a
huge overlap.

A couple of other items are:
1) Andrew Woolf's presentation in the Coverages DWG in which he describes
how to use GML encoding as mediator between conceptual content model and
exchange format together with an xlink:href pointer to the actual remote
data

  http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=34523

2) Charles Roswell soliciting input to the ISO 19123 coverage specification
which is up for revision this year.

Obviously I'm leaving out many other relevant discussions, but that's enough
for this quick summary of highlights.

-- Ben