Hi,
Some of you may recall that our OGC GALEON Interoperability Experiment was
scheduled to end this month. However, we are in the middle of some very
productive developments in GALEON -- many of which we actually did not
anticipate at the beginning of the experiment, for example:
- New client and server (air quality datasets) at Washington U in St. Louis
- Effort now underway on RASDAMAN relational database server at International
U of Bremen
- Documentation for netCDF as WCS binary encoding just started at Unidata & U
of Florence
- Work on ncML-GML for 5D datasets at U of Florence/IMAA
- Further development of CSML dialect of GML underway at NERC
- Discussions underway between Boulder office of IDL and Unidata re GALEON
- ESRI is beta testing direct access to netCDF files
- In general, implementation and client/server testing will benefit from more
time
Besides being unwise to end the experiment with all these valuable projects in
the works, it would simply be impossible to create the required final reports
by the end of the month. The required documents are:
- Final Interoperability Program Reports (IPRs) posted to OGC Pending
Documents list
- Press release summarizing the results of the IE crafted by the Team with
support from the OGC Communications Team.
In terms of IPRs, my concept of the ideal situation would be for each team that
has experimented with a WCS client or server to provide a report on their
experiences. Such reports could have two parts, one would be a general
description of what works and what doesn't between client/server pairs. The
second component of the report would relate to OGC specifications. Are
changes, extensions, or profiles of the specifications needed. The latter
aspect of the reports would be only available to OGC members, but the former
would be made available to the general public. Please keep these reports in
mind and you continue to conduct your experiments. In particular, we need to
carefully consider change requests for WCS. If I am not mistaken, Peter
Baumann has already submitted WCS change requests -- some of them based on
GALEON experiences.
My suggestion is that we set a target of February 6 to have drafts of the IPRs.
That will give us a month before the March 6 technical committee meeting to
edit the documents into final form.
A view to the future: an OGC GALEON Network
It is clear to me that, considering all the exciting work that the GALEON participant
have spawned, there will be much left to be done after the March meeting. When I
discussed this with George Percivall, he suggested we consider initiating a "GALEON
Network" as an element of the OGC Networks.
OGC Networks are online infrastructures of Internet-accessible,
configuration-controlled components that implement OpenGIS specifications. OGC
Networks support persistent demonstrations and research regarding geospatial
interoperability. An OGC network can include non-OGC members.
This sounds like a great idea to me. I'd be willing to serve as the network
manager if others think that would be appropriate and I'll work with George to
get this in place by the March meeting where we can make a final decision.
GALEON Documents from the November Tech. Committee meeting
On the OGC web portal, there's a folder for presentations and documents from the previous
meeting. To find it, log into the portal and select the GALEON IE from the "project
quick selector" in the upper right hand corner of the screen.
http://portal.opengeospatial.org/index.php?m=projects
should get you a list of the active projects once you login.
Best wishes for a happy holiday season (or whatever you call the next couple
weeks.)
-- Ben