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

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  • Subject: Re: Meeting at ESRIRuss Rew [address@hidden] -> direct acces s to netCDF and/or HDF5 data for their GIS tools
  • Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 12:48:05 -0600
Russ Rew wrote:


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
the gist of the AMS paper was that the actual data transfer is the weak link in the WCS spec; geoTIFF doesnt look like a long term answer. GML needs a way to deal with binary data to really work for scientific data.
I would say we will explore netCDF from a WCS server, but we havent decided to commit to it. we have beeen waiting for a demand for GIS services to develop in our community, and to see what form that will take. GML is a complex spec that would take a while for us to implement, but we have some colleagues who could help.
we are also waiting for ESRI to clarify exactly how they will proceed on their netcdf integration work; i would guess they are in the prototyping phase, and wont commit for a while. its seems unlikely to be WCS based.