GALEON IE Phase 2 Objectives

[Ben Domenico]

Andrew,

That's very good news indeed.  I know there are other groups very interested
in gaining a better understanding of how GML representations of CF-netCDF
can be made to work in a WCS environment.  Of course there is the University
of Florence work with ncML-GML, but there is also interest in the
possibility of using GMLJP2 in this general context.  One question I have is
whether there are many clients out there that can be used to access the
datasets in these forms.

Unfortunately I have unavoidable conflicts for the next two OGC TC meetings,
but it might be worth having a discussion on this general topic at the
Tysons Corner meeting.  Sean Forde can usually find some time in the
Coverages Working Group session for GALEON-related conversations.

-- Ben

On 8/21/06, Woolf, A (Andrew) <A.Woolf at rl.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> Hi Ben (et al),
>
> We're continuing our work on CSML within the UK NERC DataGrid project,
> and have extended our GALEON Phase 1 WCS prototype to operate with a
> 'CSML Provider' at the backend (as mentioned in Edinburgh
> http://glue.badc.rl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/TPAC/WCS). We're currently finalising
> a new version of CSML.
>
> Also of interest is some work by our colleagues at Reading on the DEWS
> project who are developing multidimensional extensions to geoserver to
> be able to handle 4-d gridded data and netCDF
> (http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOS/Multidimensional+WCS).
>
> Best regards,
> - Andrew
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: owner-galeon at unidata.ucar.edu
> > [mailto:owner-galeon at unidata.ucar.edu] On Behalf Of Ben Domenico
> > Sent: 05 August 2006 00:31
> > To: Unidata GALEON
> > Cc: Kenneth R. McDonald; Nadine Alameh; Beth A Plale; Tom
> > Baltzer; Olga Wilhelmi; Jennifer Boehnert; Scott Shipley
> > Subject: GALEON IE Phase 2 Objectives
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > During the last several weeks at the Unidata User Workshop,
> > the ESIP Federabion meeting, and at IGARSS 2006, I had the
> > opportunity to discuss possible objectives for the GALEON
> > Phase 2 Interoperability Experiment with a number of GALEON
> > paricipants.  From what I can decipher from my cryptic notes,
> > the goals can be divided into 3 categories:
> >
> > 1. Implement and test clients and servers that conform to the
> > new WCS 1.1 spec and experiment with them on a wide range of
> > real-world datasets.  From the GALEON perspective, some of
> > the important changes in WCS 1.1 are:
> >
> > -- multiple coverages in one request
> > -- multiple fields in a coverage
> > -- 3 spatial dimensions
> > -- 2 time dimensions (e.g., the time a forecast was run and
> > the forecast times within the run)
> > -- relative time ( e.g., the latest image, the last 5 images, ...)
> > -- non-spatial dimension (e.g., pressure or density)
> > -- irregular grids
> >
> > 2. Catalogs and/or WCS getCapabilities lists?  The
> > getCapabilities request appears to be inadequate to return a
> > list of all the coverages on a WCS server.  Several people
> > have suggested that GALEON Phase 2 include experiments that
> > involve CS-W (Catalog Services for the Web) as well as WCS.
> > As an illustration of the challenge, the top level THREDDS
> > catalog represented in HTML at:
> >
> >   http://motherlode.ucar.edu:8080/thredds/catalog.html
> >
> > includes several catalogs of catalogs of different types of
> > real time datasets.  If you drill down in the "NCEP Model
> > Data," you'll get to collections of many datasets, each of
> > which contains hundreds of coverages.  These catalogs are
> > being updated in near real time as new data arrive.
> > Currently these datasets are catalogued using THREDDS
> > technology, but it would be good to have a standards-based
> > interface as well.  Without such catalogs, the WCS interface
> > is much less effective.
> >
> > I should add that those NCEP model output datasets also
> > exhibit all the characteristics suggested for
> > interoperability testing in item 1 above so they can be used
> > as grist for a couple major phase 2 objectives.
> >
> > 3. GML dialects
> >
> > There appears to be an accelerating trend to develop new XML
> > schemas for many subdisciplines in the geosciences.  Even
> > within the world of GML, many profiles are evolving.   Within
> > the GALEON team discussions, at least 3 have come up in the
> > context of methods for characterizing CF-netCDF
> > characteristics in a standard form:
> >
> > -- ncML-GML
> > -- CSML
> > -- GMLJP2
> >
> > Some effort toward testing the applicability and
> > effectiveness of these approaches would be valuable.
> >
> > This is a pretty full agenda, but I would not expect all the
> > participants to work on all the items.  On the other hand, it
> > would be usefull to have at least some effort focuse in each area.
> >
> > There have also been some suggestions relating to web
> > processing and chaining services, but the general sense seems
> > to be to leave that to the OGCnetworks -- GALEON and GSN and
> > to collaborate with the ESIP Federation endeavors in that
> > realm.  See:
> >
> >   http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Web_Services
> >
> > I am going to send a copy of this to a few colleagues who
> > expressed an interest in the work but are not part of the
> > GALEON team ...  yet.
> >
> > Please let us all know which (if any) aspects of the imposing
> > list of objectives your group would likely participate in.
> > Comments or corrections to any of this are welcome.
> >
> > -- Ben
> >
> >
>