Hi Ben,
This is a really useful email, thanks.
This is a significant win in two ways. First it actually works and some
members of traditionally GIS-oriented communities (e.g. the US hydrology
community) are using it to access metoceans data from our servers for use in
GIS applications.
Excellent! This is exactly what this is all about if you ask me.
This demonstrates that there's a lot of value even in the "most basic"
use case of regularly-spaced grids. My main worry is that the value
(i.e. return on investment) will sharply decrease as we try to
incorporate more complex cases.
We've taken nearly
all the steps for those metoceans CF conforming data collections that
contain regularly spaced grids. One by one, we need to pick off the other
data types (including the unstructured meshes), develop CF conventions, map
to a standard coverage data model where appropriate.
I think this is where we need to take care. It's going to be a long,
tough road and the law of diminishing returns will hit us hard. The
number of communties that need regularly-spaced grids is going to be a
lot larger than those that really need full-complexity data through an
OGC interface. Personally, I would rather spend time on rolling the
GALEON1 approach much more widely so we can build a base of really
good-quality, well-defined, services that people can really use. I
know it's an interesting piece of research to keep pushing the
envelope, but we need to be clear about what we're buying.
Cheers, Jon
