DRAFT

Summary of Kick Off teleconference meeting for OGC GALEON IE

August 15, 2005

Participants:

• Rob Raskin, JPL

• Simon Evans and Steve Kopp, ESRI
• Clemens Portele, Interactive Instruments
• George Percivall and Carl Reed, OGC
• Norman Barker and David Burridge, RSI International, UK
• Frank Warmerdam, CadCorp
• John Caron and Ben Domenico, Unidata/UCAR
• Andrew Woolf and Dominic Lowe of NERC

Question about GALEON’s 2-pronged approach

The teleconference started with an explanation of why the GALEON interactions are not all being handled within the formal OGC mechanisms. At least in part, GALEON is an effort to bring together existing technologies and communities associated with THREDDS, OPeNDAP, and netCDF clients and services with those of the traditional GIS community – through the use of OGC standard interfaces. The idea is that the work associated with practical implementations will be handled outside the OGC whereas the work related to interface specifications will be handled within the OGC context. This will allow groups that are not part of the OGC who working on aspects of the implementations to participate fully in their aspect of GALEON while still preserving the intellectual property rights of the OGC in terms of the interface specifications. In the long term, GALEON will serve as an integrating force between the two communities and may provide an incentive for some groups to become part of the OGC, but, in the meantime, this dual approach allows everyone to participate actively in the aspects of GALEON relevant to them.

George Percivall and Carl Reed: suggested results for GALEON

George’s suggestion for some of the things GALEON might accomplish:

• Draft modifications for possible improvements to the WCS specification

• A list of “best practices” for interacting with netCDF datasets via WCS

• A determination of what works and what doesn’t in terms of interactions between WCS clients and servers using netCDF datasets.

Rob Raskin, JPL:

A WCS server for oceanographic data in netCDF datasets and the SWEET ontology. Currently the JPL server has a WMS interface but WCS will be added.

Steve Kopp, ESRI:

ESRI has implemented a native netCDF interface to their suite of applications. Their goal is to experiment with the WCS interface as a mechanism for extending the netCDF access to make use of web services via the standard WCS. They are also interested in working with others on the challenges associated with multidimensional data in a traditional GIS environment.

Clemens Portele, Interactive Instruments:

They are also interested in the issues of multidimensional data in a GIS environment. His focus is on the GML specifications so he will be especially interested in the NcML-GML (U. of Florence) and CSML (NERC) contributions. The relationship of GALEON to the GML-JPEG2000 interoperability is another area we should monitor closely.

David Burridge and Norman Barker, RSI, UK:

They are actively involved in the GDEVL <<need to spell out the acronym>> project which will server up climate data in netCDC through WCS. An important goal is to be able to access the data through the RSI IDL client. Currently they are working with an implementation that converts netCDF data into sets of geoTIFFs for different height levels. Ben commented that this part of the experiment is especially interesting because IDL has, for some time, been able to access datasets via netCDF and OPeNDAP interfaces so it will be interesting to assess the impact of having the WCS interface in the middle.

John Caron, Unidata:

Unidata has a WCS server working (There is a pointer to it in the GALEON wiki.) and we’d like to have as many different clients as possible testing it to see whether it really works.

Andrew Woolf and Dominic Lowe, NERC:

CSML incorporates metadata from climate-related datasets with GML. They will test CSML and the WCS interface for serving netCDF client datasets. This work is part of their project with the British Office of Meteorology << Check on this!!??>>

Closing Discussions

It was agreed that participants would attempt to add short term (one month goals) to their sections in the Implementation Progress Page.  Ben will also contact the OGC staff to find ways to integrate the OGC GALEON email lists with the GALEON list at Unidata (which has non-OGC members).

The next GALEON teleconference will be scheduled in mid-September.