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Hello Bryan (and GALEON, GSN, All): <http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Air_Quality/Chemistry_Naming_Conventions> Your thoughtful response and clarifications regarding the CF group are highly relevant to this emerging Air Quality/Chemistry Interoperability group. Below are some of my own thoughts on the relationship between this aerosol/chemistry interoperability group, the CF group and other international interoperability groups. The binary netCDF data structures are just as useful for chemistry as they are for meteorological data storage and transfer. Therefore its adaption and promotion in the atmospheric composition community is highly desirable. Indeed, the Air Quality/Chemistry Interoperability group intends to use netCDF for aerosol and chemistry data exchange. The addition of the CF convention significantly enhances netCDF by providing standardized metadata as well as structural constraints to the very flexible netCDF formatting. Your invitation that our aerosol/chemistry workgroup joins the CF committees is highly appreciated. Hopefully, someone with backgrounds like Christiane Textor and Martin Schultz would be willing to participate. My own enthusiasm for netCDF-CF is somewhat tempered by the reality that WMO and others have their favored data models, formats, and naming conventions. Hence, forcing a wholesale transition to netCDF-CF may be counterproductive at this time. One interoperability alternative we might consider, is the use of mapper and adapter software components as mediators between data 'standards'. The netCDF-CF convention encourages the use of standard web-based data access interfaces such as the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS): Data access is specifying the parameter, 3D bounding box (xyz) and time range. In fact, as part of the Geo-interface to Atmosphere, Land, Earth, Ocean, NetCDF<http://www.ogcnetwork.net/galeon>(GALEON) interoperability experiment, an international workgroup led by Ben Domenico of Unidata is augmenting the WCS standard to include netCDF-CF. Another voluntary workgroup is the GEOSS Services Network<http://www.ogcnetwork.net/gsn>(GSN) coordinated by the OGC's George Percivall. Through GSN, a series of demonstrations<http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Image:UserandGEOSS_Architecture.png> are being prepared under the theme "The User and the GEOSS Architecture". The July 30th workshop and demo in Denver <http://www.ogcnetwork.net/node/137>will highlight air quality and climate change. <http://www.ogcnetwork.net/node/137> The Air Quality/Chemistry Interoperability group is already established an effective link to the CF group through the Air Quality/Chemistry Naming Conventions <http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Air_Quality/Chemistry_Naming_Conventions>led by Christiane Textor. However, my perception is that international organizations such as WMO have broader interoperability needs, beyond CF. For example, WMO is interested in improving the overall data flow between the WMO-GAW <http://www.wmo.ch/web/arep/gaw/gaw_home.html> Data Centers and also a better data utilization by their user communities. Hence, it may be beneficial to establish partnerships between the Air Quality/Chemistry/CF group to other complementary international workgroups such as GALEON and GSN to provide standards-based approach to broader "solutions", e.g. standard formats and metadata ( e.g. netCDF-CF), standard data access services (e.g. WCS, GALEON), reusable processing services and interoperability demos/testbeds (GSN). This combination would allow the creation of loosely coupled, user-oriented software for generating actionable knowledge from the immense raw data pool. I see a favorable alignment of stars for the realisation of these possibilities through the confluence of these technologies. Conceivably, many of the international organizations, programs and agencies such as WMO, GEOSS <http://www.earthobservations.org/about/about_GEO.html>, could be convinced of these opportunities. Of course, it is up to us, the pro-active community to make our case. Given a favorable feedback to this somewhat grandiose group linking attempt, I would be happy to prepare a better organised set of links to the above interoperability groups - and others suggested by the addressed community. As an initial step toward such linking, I'm posting this message to the GALEON and the GSN mailing lists as well as to the Air Chemistry Interoperability wiki discussion page<http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Talk:Wiki_Workspace#......BLawrence:_CF_Website_Prototype>. Cordial greetings to all, Rudy Husar On 6/18/06, Bryan Lawrence <b.n.lawrence@xxxxxxxx > wrote:
Hi Martin My apologies for the extreme delay in replying to this email. I know things have moved on, but I wanted to just make a couple of points. Firstly, I see WGCM as the *initial* home of the CF governance panel, and no more than that.The newest draft of the white paper which I hope to get approved (by all the authors) "really soon now" makes it clear that the membership of this panel and the WGCM should move the parent body if that makes sense for the CF community ... CF is for the wider community - indeed, despite being a "modeller" myself, my involvement is really on behalf of the atmospheric observation community (and indeed aerosol and chemistry data are causing us problems at the BADC because of the lack of appropriate standard names). I would be concerned if any community felt disenfranchised! While it seems that we have resolved a way forward for establishing the standard names in your community it would be helpful if your community were to get involved in the ongoing CF issues. What is clear now is that we will try and establish the governance structure in the CF white paper over the next few months, but we do want wide representation on both the committees and the governance panel. You will (I hope) have noted that the committees are supposed to be self-selected ... so hopefully some of those to whom this email is copied will get involved. As far as the governance panel goes, it sounds like Len should definitely be on it (if he wishes to be ...). Could someone please give me his contact details, and/or introduce him to the CF white paper and the issues? Regards, Bryan
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