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Hi Peter: Peter Baumann wrote:
Hi all, this discussion is very valuable to the WCS group, it certainly will impact our discussions. John Caron wrote:There is still a hope that core + say, geotiff would be a good LCD (lowest common denominator) to strive forInteresting; actually one argument for us to avoid any format encoding in the core was that other communities should not be bothered with formats they are not interested in. Good to know that you folks like Geotiff :-)
Well, we are familiar with it, and can write it out. Its really just a matter of doing what the clients need. It doesnt really have time/vertical dimensions, or I think even units, although Frank W. has proposed some "standards" that can be used. AFAIKT, theres nobody in charge of it, not even an email group. So thats kind of fatal. We think netcdf/CF is a better LCD, but we have to keep convincing clients.
Still, however, there is further communities. In future WCS is intended to cover all the spatiotemporal dimensions equally, which includes any subset of the xyzt axes. In particular: "time-only" coverages will be supported, particularly having in mind the SWE community. (On a side note, there will be a dedicated harmonization meeting at the next TC meeting in Valencia where SWE's O&M and the WCS coverage model will talk to each other, among others.) Now environmental sensoring people might implement a WCS supporting 1-D time series which never will offer 2-D coverages; IMHO we should not force them into supporting Geotiff. Notably this is not only about plugging in open-source libtiff. It concerns coordinate conversion, interpolation, etc - in short: a hell of a lot of work, in their case just for nothing. Bottom line, we could not find any format which all communities uniformly are interested in, so we factored it out.
Yes i understand, seems core + extensions is the best shot. Although Id probably argue that one of the extensions may become dominant in the future, and become the de-facto "common format".
As Dominic points out, making orthogonal extensions would be a help. Going back to some previous subjects : "data not on regular grids" and "non-standard CRS". If the core does not provide adequate solutions to this for our community, is it possible that the "galeon extention(s)" can fix this without breaking the rules? Similarly, could we create an asynchronous response in our extension? thanks for your time, John
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