Marine Metadata Interoperability Project Directions

• To: "Unidata GALEON" <galeon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Unidata Techies" <techies@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Subject: Marine Metadata Interoperability Project Directions
• From: "Ben Domenico" <bendomenico@xxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 10:03:27 -0600

Hi Unidata techies and GALEON team members:

After spending the last week immersed in workshops, training, and strategy
sessions on a variety of topics regarding how Sensor Web Enablement
technologies (including SensorML and Sensor Observation  Services) relate to
the Marine Metadata Interoperablity project, I thought I should alert you
all to some of the directions these efforts are taking.

The places to go for background are:

--  http://marinemetadata.org/

-- http://www.sensorsportal.com/HTML/DIGEST/may_06/Sensor_web_specification.htm

The reason I bring this up is that there appears to be considerable overlap
in functionality between these efforts and those of THREDDS and GALEON.  In
particular, Sensor Observation Services (SOS) can be used (and I believe are
already being used) to deliver many of the same kinds of datasets that we
are delivering via THREDDS Data Servers including the OPeNDAP and WCS
interfaces.  Moreover, there are projects using the SOS getCapabilities
interface to populate catalogs of datasets available.  Such catalogs of
course are one of the topics we plan to address in GALEON Phase 2 and this
is also related to the work underway in the ACCESS project at George Mason
U. and NASA Goddard.

To me, this is daunting in that it represents another (OGS-based) standard
approach for enabling access to many of the same datasets being served in
THREDDS, OPeNDAP, LAS, GDS, WCS and other such servers.  On the other hand,
I was heartened by a slide shown by Luis Bermudez (attributed to -- or was
it blamed on --  Simon Cox) that showed SOS using WCS, WFS, and so forth on
the "back end" data access protocols.  So in that view, the SOS tools pro
just provide another access layer above the services we have been working
on.

One thing that is perfectly clear is the fact that I personally have a lot
of work to do in order to become conversant with these efforts.  But I
thought I'd make you all aware of these initiatives if you are not already.
For those of you are already familiar with these approaches, I encourage you
to offer your comments on how they relate to our earlier work.

-- Ben