Dom, all,
Apologies for not jumping in earlier but I'm building a new
supercomputer and I've been doing the manual labor of late...
I would like to see some capability for specifying the unadorned
filetype. netCDF, if well-formed, is essentially replete with metadata
especially if it's CF-compliant. It shouldn't require another wrapper,
I believe. However, if we don't have a well-formed (read,"arbitrary")
netCDF, or GRiB/GRiB2 or some other file returned where we're not so
sure of its origins, I think XML metadata is a requirement.
gerry
Dominic Lowe wrote:
Hi Jon,
To give some background on this - I put forward a change request to the WCS
group suggesting that we allow a WCS to return a single file with no
accompanying XML manifest. This was the standard functionality of WCS 1.0.0
but was removed for version 1.1.0.
Currently (1.1.0) a WCS must request with a Multipart MIME or with a Coverages
XML document that points to the coverage file(s). Unlike 1.0.0 there is no
option to just return a single file (netcdf in this case). I felt that both
these other options required more effort on the part of the consumer (effort
that may be worthwhile in some cases, but may just be additional overhead in
other cases). Therefore I would like to see the simple response reinstated.
So unadorned in this sense means without the XML manifest, as opposed to
without CF metadata.
Here is the change request:
http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=23130&version=1
Cheers,
Dom