Re: Meeting at ESRIRuss Rew [address@hidden] -> direct acces s to netCDF and/or HDF5 data for their GIS tools

>To: address@hidden
>From: "Haaring, P.A. (MIA-RIKZ)" <address@hidden>
>Subject: Re: 20040712: Meeting at ESRI
>Organization: National Institute for Coastal and Marine Management, The Hague, 
>The Netherlands
>Keywords: 200407121326.i6CDQNaW028420

Hi Pieter,

> do you have any updates on your post in the netcdf-hdf mailing list
> regarding "direct access for netCDF/HDF5 files in ESRI tools"?
> 
> I would like to write a article on this subject for our internal GIS
> newsletter and would like to know how if ESRI have made any formal
> commitments about this.

I did hear a bit more from someone else at the meeting about a later
decision at ESRI to support access to netCDF data.  Here's a summary
of the phone call I got on June 14:

  This morning I got a call from David Maidment (a leading authority on
  water resources and GIS, author of ArcHydro, and professor at UT
  Austin) who had just been talking with Steve Kopp (a senior ESRI
  developer) about results from a meeting we participated in at ESRI
  last week, organized by Dr. Maidment.  At the meeting, I gave a
  presentation on netCDF and had a separate hour-long discussion with
  Scott Morehouse (ESRI's Director of Software Development and
  "visionary on advancing the theory and practice of GIS" according to
  the ESRI's "Modeling Our World" publication).  Jack Dangermond, ESRI's
  founder and CEO, was also involved in some of the discussion.

  According to Maidment, ESRI has since determined to add netCDF access
  to their products, allowing them to read, view, and query netCDF data.
  It's now on their immediate agenda, and may make it into an upcoming
  release.

  I had suggested that they handle georeferencing problems by specifying
  that datasets must comply with particular netCDF conventions to be
  accessible from ESRI products, such as the CF Conventions
  <http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cms/eaton/cf-metadata/CF-1.0.html> or the
  somewhat wider set of conventions supported by John Caron's GeoGrid
  class.

  This will simplify integrating geoscience datasets with GIS systems
  and is about the best outcome we could have hoped for, certainly
  better than using a whole-file conversion approach, or using geoTIFFs
  as a bridge format.  I'm fairly certain much of the desire to support
  netCDF came from the Atmospheric Data Model Workshop in January 2004,
  organized as part of the NCAR GIS initiative, so credit is also due to
  Olga Wilhelmi, Terri Betancourt, and others who participated in that
  workshop.

> I noticed also a move to GML encapsulation of netcdf in a recent
> presentation from one of your colleges. John Caron in "NetCDF to
> GIS: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" concluded "Possible solution:
> extend GML to allow binary data, specify the georeferencing once in
> GML. Recommend the simplicity of the netCDF data model"
> 
> Is this the new direction unidata is taking? Or betting on two
> horses?

I forwarded your question to John Caron, in case he has comments.  I
think he has been working on recommending netCDF as a form for binary
data for some of the OpenGIS protocols, such as WCS.

--Russ