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Hi, This is a quick summary of the OGC Technical Committee meeting highlights from the perspective of our community. Our proposal was accepted to start the process of an OGC CF-netCDF encoding specification standard. The TC voted unanimously yesterday afternoon to publish the CF-netCDF discussion paper as a starting point for the standard. And the wheels were set in motion to form our own OGC CF-netCDF SWG (Standard Working Group). That process will take a week or so. The kick off SWG telecon is set for October 14. I should note that there was discussion in our session as to whether the standardization of encoding formats is necessary at all and how the CF community will react to having CF become part of the OGC standard. Andrew Woolf, who feels strongly that all the necessary information can be conveyed via GML and XLINK, voted in the CF-netCDF session against recommending the TC publish the discussion paper. The vote in the session was 9 yes, 1 no, and 3 abstain. Meanwhile our parallel effort to extablish CF-netCDF as the first encoding format for the WCS protocol continued on track. The WCS SWG endorsed the recent revised draft and encouraged Stefano and me to make the edits that will make the document a full candidate standard. There were many other very useful discussions on topics important to our community. The need to deal with multiple time variables, e.g., sampling, result, forecast times etc was discussed at length in the Observations and Forecasts session. Issues related to Coordinate Reference Systems for images were hashed out in a joint session between the GML and WCS groups. And there were several excellent presentations on standards related efforts by Ph D students in the Coverages session. One of them was on research in the area of unstructured grids which is a topic our coastal oceans and CF colleagues confront. Hopefully we've established a productive working relationship there. Enough for now. -- Ben
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