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Having the use cases is great, thanks Ben.In personal conversations and requirements development meetings, and in the published literature, some scientists have emphasized the importance of being able to have the *exact* (their words) data that was produced by the original sensor/device/system. (I would expect climate scientists to be very much in this camp, given the inspection that IPCC reports, conclusions, and data receive.)
The use below of "the original files" is suggestive, in that it most sensors don't produce files, they produce streams -- so a file often represents a modification of the original data set already. And I totally agree that 99% of the uses of the data -- probably more than that -- want the transmogrified data in this modified form -- whatever form they can easily use. So that is clearly the dominant usage.
But there is a strong minority that insists on an auditable record of the data as it was originally produced, just in case the reformatting has done something, or may have done something, and they need to go back and see what was going on.
JohnP.S. What is 'bottom-posting' and why is it considered good? I was always told to put my reply at the top -- people don't like having to read the old stuff first, especially if they are blind or using an audio reader.... There's so much to learn, sigh.
On Oct 14, 2008, at 7:49 PM, Roy Mendelssohn wrote:
Hi Jon: I will follow bad internet etiquette and not bottom post, and I think I agree with a lot of what you said except for the fact of whether scientists want the original files. Let me give an example. Our high resolution satellite day might have a global file for each day. I want a time series of that data for a small region off of California. You know what, I actually do not what to download the several thousand files taking up many gigabytes to get that data. It would be nice if I could get just that region for my time period in a single file. You can do this with THREDDS/OPeNDAP, and that is the use case we see most. Or think of the lagrangean case I mentioned with animal tags where the tags only have position and the scientist wants an environment variable along that track. Again, they do not want to have to download all of the files to get that small amount of data. The ability to subset the data before the download, and as discussed at GO-ESSP sometimes perform server-side functions ( eg give me a time series of the integrated heat in the upper 150m over a region), which is then the "data" that I will be using over and over again in the analysis. When we start to include these type of uses into our use cases, then we need to rethink our services. There is also one other point, one I made to Ben privately. The use cases all assume that the user in the use case will actually be willing to use your service. Our experience is that if you are not delivering data in the form and the in the way that they think about and use data, they will go elsewhere for the data. It may not be the "Right Way" as decreed from above, but you ignore your users at your own peril. -Roy
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