[galeon] GALEON topic at EGU WCS+ meeting

• To: "Unidata GALEON" <galeon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Subject: [galeon] GALEON topic at EGU WCS+ meeting
• From: "Ben Domenico" <Ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 10:28:53 -0600

Hi all,

At the recent EGU meeting, Stefano Nativi convened a very productive
WCSplus "splinter" meeting.  I'd like to summarize here one of the
topics that I believe is particularly relevant to GALEON.  I hope
George Percival or others who were at the session will correct or
augment my comments as needed.

As you are aware, the WCS 1.2 specification is going in the direction
of a core specification with extensions.   As things are evolving now,
several aspects of the specification that are important to GALEON
will, in all liklihood, not be part of the core specification.   In
many cases, that is to be expected and is good in the sense that it
will keep the core relatively simple.  But it does mean that we will
have to participate in the development of several extensions.   Many
of items we found lacking in the WCS 1.0 specification are not likely
to become part of the core, e.g.,

-- 3 spatial dimensions
-- multiple time dimensions (e.g,, forecast run time and forecast time)
-- time relative to the present (e,g., the most recent radar image)
-- non-spatial coordinates (e.g., atmospheric pressure as a proxy for height)
-- non-gridded coverages (e.g., John Caron's proposed CF convention
for point data collections)
-- asynchronous response
-- CF-netCDF binary encoding

As I understand it, the CF-netCDF binary encoding should be submitted
as a WCS "extension standard."  I am in the process of reformating the
draft into the proper form for such a submission.  Your comments will
be valuable in that regard.

With the current WCS approach,  the other items will be submitted as
WCS extension "conformance classes."  It would be good to get
interested parties working on those as soon as possible.

In the end, we would then define a WCS "application profile for the
geosciences" which would essentially consist of all these WCS
extensions needed by our community.

As I said at the outset, I hope others will augment and correct my
summary.  I plan to have the reformatted draft of the CF-netCDF binary
encoding "extension standard" by the end of the week.

-- Ben