Summary of GALEON Gateway Implementation Teleconference
of September 20, 2005

Draft by Ben Domenico last updated: September 20, 2005

Participants:

• John Evans of NASA
• Gerry Creager of Texas A&M
• Martin Daly of CadCorp
• Rob Raskin of JPL
• Norman Barker and David Burridge of RSI, UK
• Lorenzo Bigagli and Stefano Native of U of Florence and Italian IMAA/CNR
• George Percivall of OGC
• Ben Burford, consultant for Japanese Space Agency
• LeiLei Wang of NCDC
• John Caron, Ethan Davis, and Ben Domenico from Unidata
• Peter Baumer (International U Bremen) and Clemens Portele (Interactive Instruments) could not participate but will submit written status summaries.

Introductions

LeiLei Wang of NCDC is new to the group representing the US National Climatic Data Center where they are interested in GALEON WCS as a standards-based web service interface to their data holdings.

Ben Burford has introduced the interests of the groups he represents in earlier emails to the GALEON list: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/support/help/MailArchives/galeon/msg00100.html

Status Updates:

Several groups discussed their work over the last month and plans for the coming month. Some have already posted summaries on the wiki:

http://galeon-wcs.jot.com/WikiHome

and others have indicated they will either post their summaries on the wiki or send and email to the GALEON listserve at Unidata which is archived at:

http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/support/help/MailArchives/galeon/maillist.html

Short Term Objectives:

Here too, the particpants indicated they will provide written notes on where they are heading. A few items mentioned during the teleconference are:

• According to Martin Daly, within the next week or two, Frank Warmerdam will incorporate GDAL updates into the MapServer WCS:
  
  Note from John Caron: The GDAL library now reads NetCDF files using the CF-1 convention into GDAL's georeferencing data
  model, and so users of GDAL can now translate NetCDF/CF into GDAL's various outputs. The CF
  Convention parsing is done "loosely", meaning it doesnt try to do strict CF conformance.
  This should allow WCS clients using GDAL (eg CadCORP) to recieve NetCDF files from the WCS server
  and properly display them, instead of needing to get GeoTIFFS. It should enable WCS servers using
  GDAL (eg MapServer) to read NetCDF/CF files and serve them over WCS.
  
• Gerry Creager of Texas A&M will incorporate the GDAL Mapserver updates into his server
• Rob Raskin will have his oceanographic data server running within the next month.
• Norman Barker will test interoperability of the IDL-based client with the GMU server.
• Stefano Nativi and Lorenzo Bigagli are working on ncML-GML 0.7 and will provide converters (N2G) to go from netCDF CF conventions to an ncML-GML document.
• Stefano also detailed the direction they are taking with ncML-GML to handle the more complicated netCDF dataset cases with complex domain and co-domain. These are described at:
  http://galeon-wcs.jot.com/WikiHome/Implementation%20Progress%20Page
• Work is also underway at CNR/IMAA on client-side libraries for access to ncML-GML served via WCS.

WCS Directions

John Evans gave a brief overview of the direction being taken in the WCS 1.1 specification. He indicated he would post a written summary of that information on the OGC member portal and make it available to GALEON participants who are OGC members.

Plans for the November OGC Technical Committee Meeting

It seems that only a handful of the telecon participants are planning to attend the November OGC meeting. However, it is still probably worth setting up a time at that meeting where we could have face-to-face discussions -- with special focus on those aspects of GALEON that may result in recommendations for extensions to or modifications of the WCS and GML interface specifications. In addition it would be good to use that meeting for discussions of how the GML - JPEG2000

http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/support/help/MailArchives/galeon/msg00097.html

initiative fits with GALEON WCS.