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Hello, At yesterday's telecon, the CF-netCDF Standards Working Group concluded the electronic vote on a motion to release the Draft CF-netCDF Candidate Core Standard (OGC 09-122r1) to the OGC Architecture Board for review. Since this is a key event for the group, I am appending a draft of the telecon summary and sending a copy to the GALEON mailing list as well. A copy is also available with the other meeting summaries on the OGC portal at: http://portal.opengeospatial.org/index.php?m=projects&a=view&project_id=327&tab=2&artifact_id=36339 -- Ben =========================================================================================== DRAFT Summary of the 2009 December 3 CF-netCDF SWG Teleconference A CF-netCDF SWG telecom was held Thursday, December, 2009 at 11:00 AM Eastern Time. Attendees: Ben Domenico, chair, Unidata / UCAR / NCAR Luis Bermudez, charter member, SURA Stefan Falke, charter member, Northrop Grumman Dominic Lowe, charter member, STFC Russ Rew, member, Unidata / UCAR / NCAR Tom Rink, observer, U of Wisconsin Madison Marie-Francoise Voidrot, charter member, METEO-FRANCE Draft Summaries Approved: The draft summaries of the last two telecons (November 12 and November 20) were approved without modification. Email Vote Status Update: The motion was made by Rich Signell at the previous SWG telecon and seconded by Stefano Nativi: The CF-netCDF SWG releases the Draft CF-netCDF Candidate Core Standard (OGC 09-122r1) to the Architecture Board for review. Via email, 8 of the 11 voting members voted. The other three did not vote. All 8 votes were Yes. - Luis Bermudez - Ben Domenico - Stefan Falke - Frederic Guillaud - Dominic Lowe - Roy Mendelssohn - Stefano Nativi - Rich Signell Thus the motion passed. Thus the proposed CF-netCDF candidate core specification has been placed on the OGC Architecture Board agenda for review at the Mountain View TC meeting. *Remaining Issues:* A few issues were identified in email interactions and discussed in the telecom. n There is a need to clarify up front the overall "structure" of the CF- netCDF standard. The proposed core specification addresses only the netCDF foundation. The specification will not be complete until at least one extension standard is in place for the CF conventions. One point of confusion was that some members of the SWG were under the impression that the core specification and the CF extension would all be included in one document. Ben indicated that he had always thought the core and extensions would be separate documents. But, taken together they would form one CF-netCDF specification. This clarification seemed to allay some of the concerns, but the SWG still feels the overall structure needs to be clarified up front. Dominic will work with others to draft an introductory paragraph that clarifies this. n The discussion with NASA regarding the copyright for materials in both standard specifications needs to be concluded. n There is a typo (netCDR instead of netCDF) that needs to be corrected. n The section that notes the relationship of the CF-netCDF standard to other OGC protocols and specifications could be expanded and clarified. Stefan will work with others to come up with a draft for improving this section. *Additional Discussion Points*: One key issue has arisen regarding the approach to the CF conventions extension. At present, the CF conventions document that has been proposed as a NASA standard is one document that, in several places, points to the online CF conventions specifications. This "loosely coupled" approach allows the CF conventions can continue. However, an alternative approach would be to propose a "snapshot" of the CF conventions as a standard. That would make the standard specification self contained, but it would mean that new versions of the standard would have to be ratified as the CF conventions evolve. In certain cases -- CF standard names for variables, for example -- the changes take place pretty much continuously. A related issue is whether to standardize the CF conventions as whole as the proposed NASA spec does or to propose a separate extension standard for each "scientific data/feature type." In the latter scenario, one could start with an extension for the CF conventions for grids which are the most well-defined and are in wide use. Then there would be additional extension standards for point data, trajectories, swaths, irregular grids and so forth. *CF-netCDF Session at Mountain View TC Meeting: * These CF issues are important points for discussion as the SWG moves into the next phase. The discussion will continue at the CF-netCDF session at the OGC TC meeting in Mountain View next week: Thursday, 10 December in the Asgard Training Room (CL-5) at 8:00 AM Mountain View time (11:00 AM Eastern time).
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