Re: [galeon] highlights of OGC and U of Florence meetings

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Hi Ben and all,
Thank you for the good summary of our meeting. You definitively captured and reported the important points.
I would like only to add that GEOSS and GCI (GEOSS Common Infrastructure) communities are very interested in the netCDF standardization and the WCS extension specification for netCDF-CF. 


--Stefano



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>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>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>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>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>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. 


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