Dear Peter, Ben et al,
I missed the teleconf today, but I really appreciated your classification
document.
I'd like to clarify something with the group on the scope of where we are
going. Our key concern with WCS is not WCS per se, but the lack of standard
serialisations for all the ISO coverages. Our main coverages (from numerical
models) are 'irregular grids' and 'meshes' and our (corporate) lack of uptake
of WCS as a technology is due to the fact that these aren't supported. I would
like to support efforts to achieve some standardised encodings for other
coverage types, but I'm not sure if this is the remit of this group. As far as
I am aware OGC is planning support for irregular grids in GML, but there are no
plans for meshes (?) I am aware that some groups are looking at NetCDF
encodings for meshes, but this all seems to be below the radar.
On your last point (clients and servers) - I agree a key point; not just for
visualisation clients but any processing client for the data from the server. I know
this is something Andrew Woolf is also quite passionate about. Over many cups of coffee
we have debated the concept of 'processing affordance' and how this can be implemented;
our latest work looked at registries (Feature Type Catalogues - we were looking at
Features) as a place to declare this relationship. Essentially "I am Feature X,
these services exist that can deliver me and these services exist that can process
me". This work was presented at the last OGC TC in the RWG by Kristin Stock.
Best regards
Keiran