Dear Keiran,
thanks for chiming in. Responses inline:
Keiran Millard wrote:
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.
we do know about this requirement. The need for more general coverage
types has been discussed, eg, at the last TC WCS meeting; the WCS group
is aware of it and intends to address it. It's very much a matter of
resources, hence your offer to participate is most welcome.
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.
agreed, registries are a great place for additional semantics and some
larger context. However, I believe that each service needs to be
self-contained enough to be operated in a meaningful way on its
particular semantic level.
best regards,
Peter