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I am all for developing and testing a variety of approaches, see what they have in common, and see what actually works the best for providers and users. We have even developed a product that is pretty agnostic to the data service that is being used by the original provider. And it is from our experiences with that product, which both allows us to see how easy it is too write a general client and the speed and other features of the request that causes a lot of my skepticism.
-Roy On Aug 24, 2009, at 12:33 PM, John Graybeal wrote:
On Aug 24, 2009, at 7:41 AM, Roy Mendelssohn wrote:Wouldn’t you gain in getting more active in OGC standard groups that try to address the same issues as NetCDF before making up your mind??Or perhaps OGC should have gotten more involved in existing processes and standards instead of reinventing the wheel, and most importantly ignoring how the community actually uses and thinks about their data.I am also aware of some of the SWE test beds, and for the purposes of how we use data, have yet to see one that is actually operational (as opposed to on paper) that meets our needs. Several existing community standards and services do indeed meet these, but better we let the spec designers from outside the community decide for us.The first sentence here is key: a specification has to meet the needs, and either be operational or easily be made so. ("Fitness for a particular use" is a key concept for me.) A specification that is fit for a particular purpose is worth its weight in gold, OK, even more than that. NetCDF/OPeNDAP are extremely fit for many purposes, IMHO.But the cited text above does not appear to allow the possibility that the NetCDF and OPeNDAP are not fit for *all* purposes; nor that many of the people who are involved in OGC are also involved with NetCDF systems and specifications, and have been for some time; nor that the people who are involved with OGC *have* identified communities that use and think about their data in the ways that some OGC systems support.Please note that NONE of my comment is casting any aspersion on NetCDF/OPeNDAP, nor expressing any opinion about one of these groups of specifications being better than the other. They are targeting really different communities, functional capabilities, and environments. There is a lot that they can productively adopt from each other, if I may say so, and in some cases have adopted already.(In another venue I just edited a document that emphasized ISO standards as the up and coming worldwide standard. The two things I added to my version were netCDF/OPeNDAP, and OGC SWE. And there will be others that are particularly fit for other purposes, like perhaps TAPIR for biodiversity.)So the point is, it's a big tent, and if anyone in it thinks their specification, standards body, or community of interest has the only and final answer, it probably suggests there are other parts of the tent they have yet to explore. (And it occurs to me, it could be neat if the developers of the two groups of specifications under discussion get to do that together sometime.)JohnJust for info, we have about 20TB of data online and growing, and serve data worldwide,-roy **********************"The contents of this message do not reflect any position of the U.S. Government or NOAA."********************** Roy Mendelssohn Supervisory Operations Research Analyst NOAA/NMFS Environmental Research Division Southwest Fisheries Science Center 1352 Lighthouse Avenue Pacific Grove, CA 93950-2097 e-mail: Roy.Mendelssohn@xxxxxxxx (Note new e-mail address) voice: (831)-648-9029 fax: (831)-648-8440 www: http://www.pfeg.noaa.gov/ "Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill." "From those who have been given much, much will be expected" _______________________________________________ galeon mailing list galeon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx For list information, to unsubscribe, visit: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/mailing_lists/John Graybeal jbgraybeal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
**********************"The contents of this message do not reflect any position of the U.S. Government or NOAA."
********************** Roy Mendelssohn Supervisory Operations Research Analyst NOAA/NMFS Environmental Research Division Southwest Fisheries Science Center 1352 Lighthouse Avenue Pacific Grove, CA 93950-2097 e-mail: Roy.Mendelssohn@xxxxxxxx (Note new e-mail address) voice: (831)-648-9029 fax: (831)-648-8440 www: http://www.pfeg.noaa.gov/ "Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill." "From those who have been given much, much will be expected"
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