Earlier, when Ben said "did I leave anything out?", I held back from
mentioning vocabularies because I thought they were out of scope of
the discussion. Two sentences in this email (highlighted below) made
me decide to bring them up, however.
I *think* I understand what Ben means when he says OGC O&M "are so
general they don't provide the detail needed..." : In and of
themselves, SWE/O&M don't cover as written don't cover many semantic
(and occasionally syntactic) details -- it is left to the user
community to provide those specifics, the way OOSTethys did. (Is that
what you mean?) NetCDF with CF provides a lot of that additional
detail.
At the same time, I have to say that the CF-netCDF encoding was also
insufficient for two of the communities I've dealt with. For one
example, to my understanding the OceanSITES profile had to lay out a
number of additional 'required attributes' for netCDF/CF to be
sufficient to describe those sites' data sets. In the second case, a
number of users with their own data sets found the CF vocabulary
insufficient, and no suitable way to support additional vocabularies
in the netCDF/CF context. (I want to submit a CF change request on
this last point. As soon as I can figure out the right thing to
request.)
I don't think this cuts against any of the rest of Ben's email, but I
wanted to be clear that the topics addressed so far are necessary, but
not sufficient, to provide community interoperability for most non-
trivial communities. A sufficiently integrated semantic concept is
also necessary to close the circuit.
John
On Oct 8, 2008, at 3:44 PM, Ben Domenico wrote:
Another way to look at this is that the information models of ISO
19123 and the OGC O&M are indeed general enough at the conceptual
level to encompass our data collections. *** However, they are so
general that they don't provide the detail needed to ensure that our
data is useful by other communities. On the other hand, WCS with CF-
netCDF encoding has been shown to provide sufficient detail to
enable a handful of clients and servers to interoperate with one
another on a limited subset of the data collections in the GALEON
community. ***
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John Graybeal <mailto:graybeal@xxxxxxxxx> -- 831-775-1956
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
Marine Metadata Interoperability Project: http://marinemetadata.org
