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A few thoughts on these issues:The WCS/SWE/OGC are making major contributions in elaborating conceptual models and defining remote access protocols based on them. More problematic is managing complexity and adoption paths of existing communities. One of the main weaknesses of WCS is the likely proliferation of binary encoding formats. WMS has been lucky to be able to use existing, universal formats like JPEG, and partly because of that, has been more widely adopted.
A central issue is the relation of the WCS data encoding format to its GML envelope. Should the data be "just bits" and let the GML encode all the semantics, or should a binary format also encode some/all of the semantics? In the first case, any client must understand GML, which is a big barrier to use by existing applications, plus the possibility exists that some essential information is offline or unavailable, as Tom W points out. In the second case, we have a proliferation of data encoding formats and the possibility that the semantics are encoded differently between the GML and the data.
From Unidata's POV, namely that of supporting a large community of users of netcdf and other scientific data formats, using netCDF-CF to encode the data is obvious. However, this is not just a matter of one more group advocating for their favorite bespoke format. IMHO, netCDF is close to being a "maximally simple implementation" of a binary data encoding that allows data to be more than "just numbers". Its BNF grammer fits on one side of a page of paper. If one chooses to encode semantics into the data format, and not require a client to know GML, then you need something like netCDF, and you wont find an encoding significantly simpler. The CF Conventions group has been slowly adding the necessary semantics for 10 years or so. From that motivation we decided to recommend netCDF as a WCS encoding format.
The hard part is describing in a formal way the relationship of the netCDF-CF binary response to the actual request and to any GML part of the response. Stefano et al are doing the heroic work of describing the mapping between the two models, but there is and perhaps should be a loose coupling between the two. There are always edge cases: what happens when the requested lat/lon bounding box crosses a discontinuity of the projection plane? One might get different, but reasonable, files back from different servers of the same dataset. So what can we standardize? None of this is unique to netcdf-CF or binary encodings.
Taking the first path of letting GML carry all the semantics has many advantages also, especially for new development and GIS-centric clients, and as new libraries are developed that can mitigate some of the complexity of GML. In (our) scientific community, these are new possibilities, to be experimented with and prototypes tested. Once there are real services delivering "gotta have" data we will do whatever we need to do to "get me some of that" ;^)
John Caron Unidata Steve Hankin wrote:
Robin, Alexandre wrote:Hi Steve,Just to clarify when I said NetCDF was a “NEW standard” I meant a new standard in OGC.As I was telling Ben in an offline email, I am totally conscious of its penetration and usefulness in certain communities.However, _I am not convinced that /having two standards doing the same thing in OGC /is sending the right message and is the best way to go for a standardization organization_.Hi Robin,I confess that I was aware of using a cheap rhetorical device when I twisted your intended meaning of "NEW". (Begging your tolerance.) It was helpful in order to raise more fundamental questions. You have alluded to a key question just above. Is it really best to think of the target of OGC as a the development of a single, definitive standard? one that is more general and more powerful than all existing standards? Or is it better to think of OGC as a process, through which the forces of divergence in geospatial IT systems can be weakened leading towards convergence over time? The notion that there can be a single OGC solution is already patently an illusion. Which one would you pick? WFS? WCS? SOS with SWE Common? SOS with its many other XML schema? (Lets not even look into the profusion of WFS application schema.) I trust that we are not pinning our hopes on a future consolidation of all of these. There is little evidence to indicate that we can sustain the focus necessary to traverse that path. The underlying technology is not standing still.What Ben (and David Arctur and others) have proposed through seeking to put an OGC stamp of approval on netCDF-CF technology is similar to what OGC has achieved through putting its stamp on KML ("There are sound business and policy reasons for doing so.") It is to create a process -- a technical conversation if you will -- which will lead to interoperability pathways that bridge technologies and communities. Real-world interoperability.Complete agreement that this sort of testing ought to occur. And interest to hear more about what has been achieved. But great skepticism that there is this degree of overlap between the approaches. And disagreement that this testing ought to be a precondition to OGC recognition of a significant ,community-proven interoperability mechanism like netCDF. OGC standardization of netCDF will provide a forum for testing and experimentation to occur much more rapidly and for a 2-way transfer of the best ideas between approaches. NetCDF & co. (its API, data model, CF, DAP) have a great deal to offer to OGC.There has been a lot of experimentation with SWE technologies as well that you may not know about and in many communities, especially in earth science.What I’m saying is that perhaps it is worth testing bridging NetCDF to SWE before we go the way of stamping two 100% overlapping standards as OGC compliant.- SteveRegards, ------------------------------------------------- **Alexandre Robin** Spot Image, Web and E-Business Tel: +33 (0)5 62 19 43 62 Fax: +33 (0)5 62 19 43 43 http://www.spotimage.com Before printing, think about the environment ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *De :* Steve Hankin [mailto:Steven.C.Hankin@xxxxxxxx] *Envoyé :* jeudi 20 août 2009 20:58 *À :* Tom Whittaker *Cc :* Robin, Alexandre; Ben Domenico; Unidata GALEON; wcs-2.0.swg *Objet :* Re: [galeon] [WCS-2.0.swg] CF-netCDF standards initiatives Hi Tom,I am grateful to you for opening the door to comments "from 10 thousand feet" -- fundamental truths that we know from many years of experience, but that we fear may be getting short shrift in discussions of a new technology. I'd like to offer a comment of that sort regarding the interplay of ideas today between Robin ("/I hope we don’t have to define a NEW standard .../") and Carl Reed ("/there are other organizations interested in bringing legacy spatial encodings into the OGC. There are sound business and policy reasons for doing so./").The NEW standard in this discussion is arguably SWE, rather than netCDF. NetCDF has decades of practice behind it; huge bodies of data based upon it; a wide range of applications capable of accessing it (both locally and remotely); and communities that depend vitally upon it. As Ben points out, netCDF also has its own de jure pedigree.A key peril shared by most IT standards committees -- a lesson that has been learned, forgotten, relearned and forgotten again so many times that it is clearly an issue of basic human behavior -- is that they will try to innovate. Too-common committee behavior is to propose, discuss and document new and intriguing technologies, and then advance those documents through a de jure standards process, despite an insufficient level of testing. The OGC testbed process exists to address this, but we see continually how large the gap is between the testbed process and the pace and complexity of innovations emerging from committees.Excellent reading on this subject is the essay by Michi Henning, /The Rise and Fall of CORBA/ (2006 -- http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1142044). Among the many insights he offers is**'Standards consortia need iron-clad rules to ensure that they standardize existing best practice.** There is no room for innovation in standards_._ Throwing in “just that extra little feature” inevitably causes unforeseen technical problems, despite the best intentions.'While it adds weight to an argument to be able to quote from an in-print source, this is a self-evident truth. We need only reflect on the recent history of IT. What we need is to work together to find ways to prevent ourselves from continually forgetting it.There is little question in my mind that putting an OGC stamp of approval on netCDF is a win-win process -- for the met/ocean/climate community and for the broader geospatial community. It will be a path to greater interoperability in the long run and it deserves to go forward. The merits of SWE (or GML) as an alternative approach to the same functionality also deserve to be explored and tested in situations of realistic complexity. But this exploration should be understood initially as a process of R&D -- a required step before a "standards process" is considered. If that exploration has already been done it should be widely disseminated, discussed and evaluated.- Steve ================================== Tom Whittaker wrote: I may be ignorant about these issues, so please forgive me if I am completely out-of-line....but when I looked at the examples, I got very concerned since the metadata needed to interpret the data values in the "data files" is apparently not actually in the file, but somewhere else. We've been here before: One of the single biggest mistakes that the meteorological community made in defining a distribution format for realtime, streaming data was BUFR -- because the "tables" needed to interpret the contents of the files are somewhere else....and sometimes, end users cannot find them!NetCDF and ncML maintain the essential metadata within the files:types, units, coordinates -- and I strongly urge you (or whomever) not to make the "BUFR mistake" again -- put the metadata into the files! Do not require the end user to have to have an internet connection to simply "read" the data....many people download the files and then "take them along" when traveling, for example.If I simply downloaded the file at<http://schemas.opengis.net/om/1.0.0/examples/weatherObservation.xml> I would not be able to read it. In fact, it looks like even if I also got the "metadata" file at: <http://schemas.opengis.net/om/1.0.0/examples/weatherRecord1.xml> I would still not be able to read it, since it also refers to other servers in the universe to obtain essential metadata.That is my 2 cents worth....and I hope I am wrong about what I saw inthe examples....tom------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ galeon mailing list galeon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxFor list information, to unsubscribe, visit: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/mailing_lists/
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