This
work relates to several of the proposal goals: 1. Broadening
participation and expanding community services; 2. Advancing data
services
3. Developing and deploying useful tools; 5. Providing leadership in
cyberinfrastructure. As
noted in the two following sections, the work was called out
specifically in an interaction with the review panel and in the review
panel summary.
1e.
Is the UPC prepared to provide
the same quality of support to the
newly engaged communities as it provides to its
current constituents?
While
the support
for all users will remain at
a very
high level, that does
not mean it will be exactly the same. For example,
for the core community Unidata
provides comprehensive support for a full suite of tools from data
services, through decoders, to complete analysis and
display packages. For
other
cases, the tools that are
specialized to their community may
not be available via and supported by the UPC. One example of
this is the community of
users of GIS tools. In that case Unidata supports
standards-based web
services that make our datasets available in such a way that tools that
incorporate those standard interfaces can avail themselves
of Unidata
datasets. Thus these new communities can
continue to make
use of the analysis and display tools they are familiar with while
taking advantage of the data services of the traditional
Unidata community.
Excerpt from the
proposal review panel report
Advocacy
for Community
Standards:< In
particular, the UPC could
play a significant leadership role within committees and
consortiums like OGC seeking to address the need to develop standards
and technologies for data discovery. Unidata leadership and
advocacy in this area could facilitate expanded utilization of
Unidata information resources for other research areas like climate and
provide Unidata users with easier access to other data sources
like NASA satellite information. However, the OGC letter of
recommendation in the
proposal and the Unidata responses to the review panel questions
regarding cyberinfrastructure did demonstrate that the Unidata
was actively involved in community discussion of interface and
data standards.
Brief summary of recent
progress
Background on netCDF and CF
formal standards efforts
Due to the work of
Russ Rew and the netCDF team, netCDF has been formally recognized by
the NASA Earth Standards Data Systems Working Groups (ESDSWG) Standards
Process Group (SPG): NASA ESDS NetCDF Classic and
64-bit Offset File Formats Standard
http://www.esdswg.org/spg/rfc/esds-rfc-011/ESDS-RFC-011v1.00.pdf.
Now two
efforts are underway to
have the CF (Climate and Forecast) Conventions along with NetCDF
recognized nationally by NASA and internationally
by the Opengeospatial Consortium (OGC) as standards for
encoding
georeferenced data in binary form.
Progress on
OGC standardization
As
the official
UCAR representative to the OGC
Technical Committee, Unidata
participates in 3-4 technical committee meetings per year to ensure
that Unidata and UCAR needs are met in the emerging international
standards. The most recent development is a plan to propose CF-netCDF
as an OGC binary encoding standard.
http://sites.google.com/site/galeonteam/Home/plan-for-cf-netcdf-encoding-standard
In addition to the NASA
efforts, the UPC continues to
incorporate CF-netCDF into the
broad standards baseline of the OGC. The goal of this effort
is to encourage broader use and greater interoperability among clients
and servers interchanging data in binary form. Establishing
CF-netCDF as an OGC standard for binary encoding will make it possible
to incorporate standard delivery of data in binary form via several OGC
protocols, e.g., Web Coverage Service (WCS), Web Feature Service (WFS),
and Sensor Observation Service (SOS). For over a year, the
OGC WCS SWG is already developing an extension to the core WCS for
delivery of data encoded in CF-netCDF. This independent
CF-netCDF standards effort is complementary to that in WCS and
hopefully will facilitate similar extensions for other standard
protocols.
The purpose of the CF-netCDF
SWG is to move the netCDF with CF-conventions to the state of an
adopted OGC standard. The current approach is to establish the daa
model for the netCDF classic dataset as the core standard. There
will be extensions to the core in terms of the data model, encodings,
and possibly the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The
binary encoding standard will be based on the already adopted NASA
standard. Another extension covering the CF conventions is
being
drafted and will be submitted and
will follow the same process. The core netCDF data model,
together with the binary encoding and CF extension standards,
are the
necessary elements of the overall CF-netCDF
Encoding Specification which will be described in an Overview best
practices document.. Subsequently, additional extension
standards covering areas such as the enhanced netCDF data model,
ncML-GML
metadata encoding, and netCDF APIs may be considered at the discretion
of the active SWG
members.
Ongoing Outreach Activities
AccessData (formerly DLESE
Data Services) Workshops
Unidata actively participated in this year's
workshop in
early February at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. The
overall AccessData program
is described at:
http://serc.carleton.edu/usingdata/accessdata/
and this
year's workshop page is:
http://serc.carleton.edu/usingdata/accessdata/impacts/index.html.
The project may get a no cost extension to finish up writing publications describing the results.
Other Collaborations:
- NCAR GIS
Program (official program of NCAR
as of a couple months ago)
- Marine
Metadata Interoperability Project Steering Team
- IOOS
DMAC Steering Team
- CUAHSI
Standing Committee
- OGC
Oceans
Interoperability Experiment sponsor
- UCAR
wide representative to OGC Technical
Committee
- AGU ESSI
Focus Group Secretary
- ESIN
Journal Editorial Board
- FOSS4G,
Free and Open Source Software for Geosciences
- Liaison
to OOI Cyberinfrastructure Project
- Possible collaboration with UCSD on a follow on NSF proposal for the Marine Metadata Interoperability (MMI) project.
Next Steps
The main items for the next several months are closing out the
AccessData project with the last workshop and completing the OGC
CF-netCDF standardization process, hopefully by the end of the year.
A roadmap for the OGC CF-netCDF SWG is at:
http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=37335
