[galeon] Interactions with the CF community

• To: CF-netCDF SWG <CF-NetCDF-1.0.SWG@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Subject: [galeon] Interactions with the CF community
• From: Ben Domenico <Ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Fri, 13 May 2011 08:47:43 -0600

Hello all,

The week, representatives of the CF community met as a part of the GO-ESSP
meetings hosted by the US National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, NC.

http://nomads.ncdc.noaa.gov/go-essp/

This is a quick summary of the highlights of the interactions with the CF
community as they relate to the work of the OGC CF-netCDF SWG.

I gave a very brief summary of our near term SWG goals to propose extensions
to the netCDF core for CF and for the enhanced netCDF data model.  There was
good discussion of the OGC processes and how the two communities relate to
one another.   I gave my understanding which is that we are bringing a
community standard that results from a bottom up process into the realm of a
formal international standards body that tends to proceed in a more top down
fashion in many cases.  We are in effect bringing a snapshot of the CF
conventions and proposing it as an OGC standard.   As the CF conventions
evolve, we can bring subsequent snapshots to the OGC for OGC adoption.  It
was pointed out by Russ Rew that, if CF 1.6 is adopted by OGC as a standard
and the CF moves on to CF 1.7 sometime in the future, the CF community can
decide at that time whether to propose 1.7 to the OGC.    Whether or not
that happens does not have an effect on the CF 1.7 itself.  No strong
concerns about the proposed approach were expressed at the meeting, but I
encouraged people to get in touch with us if any came to mind.  An important
note here is that the CF community feels that it would be best to bring the
just-now adopted CF 1.6 to the OGC as a standard because it includes the
Discrete Sampling (aka point data) conventions.  The CF 1.6 document should
be available within a month.   This means that we will probably not have any
concrete proposed extension drafts in time for the next OGC TC meeting in
June so I am only reserving a one hour session for CF-netCDF.

There was also discussion of the differences between the OGC process and
that of CF.  It even touched on whether CF standardization might work within
the OGC administrative framework, but this was a highly speculative
interaction and I won't get into details here.

There were other interactions at the meeting which may be of interest to the
group:

Jonathan Gregory gave a (remote) presentation on the CF abstract data model
he is drafting.  This model is independent of the netCDF data model and
emphasizes the relationship between data values and "grid" cells, so in some
sense, it is complementary to the one Stefano has drafted for the CF-netCDF
data model.   But the people involved in the two efforts are aware of one
another, so we should be able to deal with any perceived discrepancies.

James Gallagher, the technical VP of OPeNDAP.org, indicated they are
considering joining the OGC and getting involved in the standardization of
OPeNDAP.

David Arctur of OGC mentioned that HDF has a large role in OWS-8, so this
may help in the area of the binary encoding of the netCDF enhanced data
model into netCDF4/HDF5.

I am going to as Russ to forward this to the appropriate CF email lists for
comments and corrections.

-- Ben