[galeon] highlights of OGC and U of Florence meetings

• To: CF-netCDF SWG <CF-NetCDF-1.0.SWG@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Unidata GALEON <galeon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Unidata Staff <staff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Jennifer Boehnert <boehnert@xxxxxxxx>, Olga Wilhelmi <olgaw@xxxxxxxx>, Lawrence Buja <southern@xxxxxxxx>
• Subject: [galeon] highlights of OGC and U of Florence meetings
• From: Ben Domenico <Ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:24:49 -0600

Hi all,

The OGC Technical Committee meetings and the follow up with our colleagues
at the University of Florence were very enjoyable and productive.  Below is
a brief summary of the highlights.

I hope Stefano and others who were part of these meetings will add to this
brief summary and correct any errors.

-- Ben

============================================================================
*OGC Technical Committee Meetings*

For us, the most relevant session was the CF-netCDF Standards Working Group
Session.  The meeting folder is available at
http://portal.opengeospatial.org/index.php?m=projects&a=view&project_id=82&tab=2&artifact_id=37917

The status update part of the meeting basically went over the difficulties
we've run into with initial efforts to draft OGC encoding standards for the
netCDF core and CF conventions.   Basically what this comes down to is that
we are working in the problematic area where the top-down approach of ISO
and the OGC come together with the bottom up standards and conventions that
have evolved in our community of practice over the last couple decades of CF
and netCDF development.   In retrospect, it should probably not have been
surprising that mismatches between the two approaches would bring to light
some mismatches.

On the positive side of the ledger, Stefano provided a very enlightening
presentation on what we have learned from the experience:

Discussion of the CF-netCDF Data Model Standardization
http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=38337

The main points in the discussion were:
•Initial attempts at CF-netCDF standardization have been very useful – as a
learning experience
•We need a common understanding of:
– conceptual data model, community profile model, application model,
–canonical encodings
–specification targets, conformance classes and related conformance tests
•Special challenges:
–We are bringing together top down ISO/OGC with bottom up community
standards
–This is the first OGC attempt at abinary encoding specification
–We will be among the first to use modular encoding spec (OGC 08-13)1r3

As it turns out, the WCS SWG has come up with a draft of WCS 2.0 which has
been cited as an ideal example the new modular encoding spec., so we now
have a good model to work with.  In the end the sense of those present at
the meeting is that we should attempt to use the new encoding spec, but also
keep the CF-netCDF specs the same as those of NASA as much as possible.

The MetOceans Domain Working Group continued the lively discussions of
topics that have arisen in telecons.  the presentations and summaries are
available at:
http://portal.opengeospatial.org/index.php?m=projects&a=view&project_id=82&tab=2&artifact_id=37420

And in the Metadata DWG, Ted Habermann gave a presentation on "NetCDF Meets
ISO" which outlined a process for enhancing netCDF files and TDSs with
metadata useful in discovery systems as well as use metadata.
http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=38472


*Meetings with the Earth and Space Sciences Informatics group at the
University of Florence*

Much of the discussion centered on the details of how to create OGC
standards for CF-netCDF that incorporate the bulk of the NASA versions, but
still meet the requirements of the OGC modular specs.  Also it seems
sensible to work in parallel on the CF-netCDF encoding extension for WCS 2.0
and the independent CF-netCDF encoding spec.  That way the WCS extension can
point to the independent CF-netCDF specification.

We also went over common areas of interest because of Unidata's goal of
outreach into climate science.   The U of Florence is very active in the
GEOSS climate change and biodiversity focus area. Recent interactions with
the MetOceans and the NCAR GIS project have turned up possible areas of
collaboration among those groups, visiting scientists to NCAR, and the
nascent NOAA Climage Service initiative.   We agreed to follow up on those
possibilities.

Finally, the ESSI team gave an enlightening demonstration of their GI-cat
distributed catalog services package

http://zeus.pin.unifi.it/cgi-bin/twiki/view/GIcat

Among the many capabilities of GI-cat, it can provide a search service for
datasets stored in THREDDS Data Servers.  It may be of interest to our
community as an additional tool for sites that are implementing TDSs.