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."
Summary
of Recent Progress
Background on netCDF and CF formal standards efforts
Following on the success of Russ Rew and the netCDF team in
establishing netCDF and CF as NASA standards, efforts continue to
have CF-netCDF recognized internationally by the Opengeospatial
Consortium (OGC) as standards for encoding georeferenced data in
binary form.
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
overall plan and status is maintainted at http://sites.google.com/site/galeonteam/Home/plan-for-cf-netcdf-encoding-standard. In keeping
with the proposal and review panel recommendations, the goal
of this effort is to encourage broader use of Unidata's data
by fostering 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.
Progress on OGC standardization
In
2011, the netCDF Classic data model was established as the OGC
core netCDF standard. The binary encoding for the classic
data model was established as the first extension to the netCDF
core standard. At this time the netCDF enhanced data model
and the CF (Climate and Forecast) conventions have been proposed
as extensions
to the core. The OGC dopted standards documents
are available at
http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/netcdf
The highlights of the March 2012 OGC Technical Committee meetings with
special emphasis on the CF-netCDF work are summarized in
https://sites.google.com/site/galeonteam/Home/cf-netcdf-standardization-information/highlights-of-the-ogc-tc-meetings-march-2012-in-austin
One particular note of interest is that representatives of OPeNDAP,
Inc. and the HDF Group both attended the CF-netCDF Standards Working
Group session for the first time. This bodes well in the sense
that key collaborating organizations from our community are active
participants in the OGC standards process.
Ongoing
Outreach Activities
AccessData (formerly DLESE Data Services) Workshops
The overall AccessData program is described at:
http://serc.carleton.edu/usingdata/accessdata/ and the most recent
workshop page is:
http://serc.carleton.edu/usingdata/accessdata/impacts/index.html. The AccessData
team is now working on several publications to document the results of
the project.
One of the resulting publications was the winner of a AAAS
Science Prize for Online
Resources in Education (SPORE). The essay "Making Earth
Science Data Accessible and Usable in Eduction" is available in the
online version of
Science
at:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6051/1838.full.pdf
Earthcube Activities.
Over
the last half year, much of Unidata's outreach activity has been
focused on the NSF Earthcube initiative. After
participating elaborate preparations for the in the EarthCube
charrette in November, including involvement in several
whitepapers, Unidata participated in the charrette itself with
IEEE covering travel. Now we are involved in several
proposals for EAGER grants although we have not
taken the lead in writing any of the proposals. For some of us,
the long term vision for EarthCube still is somewhat unclear although
there are several valuable ideas and collaborative relationships
forming. It will be good for Unidata to be aware of those
and a part of the ones that make sense.
Other Collaborations:
- NCAR GIS
Program
- Marine Metadata
Interoperability (MMI) Project Steering Team
- IOOS DMAC
Steering Team
- CUAHSI Standing
Committee
- UCAR wide
representative to OGC Technical Committee
- AGU ESSI Focus
Group Board
- ESIN Journal
Editorial Board
- Host for OGC
Technical Committee Meeting September 2011
- Liaison to
OOI Cyberinfrastructure Project
- Several
collaborations with EarthCube teams
- Possible
collaboration with European Commission team on proposal with
NSF funding for Unidata. (Note that it seems we missed
the opportunity for a funding opportunity in February.
This is a case where focus on EarthCube may have distracted
from an opportunity that might have been more productive.
Planned
Activities
The next steps in the
CF-netCDF standardization effort are outlined in the OGC
CF-netCDF Standards Working Group agenda for the March meeting.
- Disposition of action items from September Boulder TC
meeting
- Status of Enhanced Data Model extension to the netCDF core
standard (Ben Domenico)
- Status of CF extension to the netCDF core standard (Ben for
Stefano Nativi)
- Note on status of formal registration of netcdf MIME type
with IANA (Ben)
- Submit Discussion Paper on Uncertainty model for netCDF-CF
(Submitted by Lorenzo Bigagli)
- General discussions:
- process of submitting netCDF4 encoding based on existing
NASA standard
- Coordination with OGC OPeNDAP standardization activities.
This is being coordinated with
OPeNDAP, Inc who recently joined the OGC as a voting member of
the Technical Committee. An approach for dealing with the
HDF5 encoding of the netCDF enhanced data model is still being
sought..
After the last policy committee meeting, I created a white paper
based on my "Data Interactive Publications" presentation which
seemed to be well received. It's available at
https://sites.google.com/site/datainteractivepublications/home/white-paper-on-data-interactive-publications
Considerable support for this concept developed at the charrette
and the concept was moved forward by a team lead by Tanu Malik of
the University of Chicago. However, it was not among
the Expressions of Interest encouraged to submit an EAGER
proposal. The group is considering publishing an
article based on the EarthCube whitepaper and subsequent work in
an online journal.
Relevant
Metrics
- One
co-authored essay in Science
-
The list of "other collaborations above includes a
dozen organizations we have regular interactions
with. In most cases, our interactions are as
representatives of our community on their steering or
policy groups, so we have at least some voice in their
direction.
-
Over the years of these standardization efforts, ESRI
has incorporated the netCDF among the input and output
formats that their arcGIS tools work with
directly. This represents a user community that
numbers in the millions, but it isn't possible for us
to measure how many of those users now use it to
access our data.
-
The standards efforts enable us to collaborate on an
ongoing basis with dozens of international
organizations -- especially those represented in the
OGC MetOceans, Earth System Science, and Hydrology
Domain Working Groups.
