OGC meeting highlights

Hi,

Aplologies to those of you who've already seen this several times on
other lists, but I've gotten enough questions from THREDDS
collaborators that I thought I should send it to this list as well.

As some of you may be aware, I'm the official UCAR representative to
the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) technical committee.  A week ago I
attended my second technical committee meeting (hosted by and at the
U.N. this time.)

The main highlight for us was the fact that Lorenzo Bigagli (Stefano's
colleague at the U of Florence) and I were given an hour on the
agenda, at which we proposed an Interoperability Experiment (IE) that
in essence proposes to extend the Web Coverage Service (WCS) protocol
with a gateway for serving data from THREDDS-integrated servers based
on THREDDS, netCDF. Common Data Model, OPeNDAP, ADDE technology via
the WCS interface.  On the prototype servers, the datasets will be
delivered as "coverages" encoded in geoTIFF (already operating in our
WCS), NcML-GML (the work of the U of Florence group), and netCDF (a
proposed addition to the current list of 5 OGC "blessed" binary
encodings.)

I've attempted to summarize the approach we're taking with this WCS Gateway in:

http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/projects/THREDDS/OGC/WCS-THREDDS%20Gateway.htm

This description was created before the TC meeting so it is somewhat
out of date, but I hope to add the powerpoints that Lorenzo and I used
and examples of the NcML and NcML-GML as soon as I get a chance, but I
thought you would want to see what we're up to now.

We are now thinking of calling this initiative GALON (Gateway for
Atmosphere Ocean Land netCDF).

I'll attach a list of OGC technical committee members who expressed
interest in participating in the IE.

-- Ben

Liping Di (before the meeting), LAITS, George Mason University
address@hidden

Frank Warmerdam, consultant who works with OPeNDAP  and CADcorp
address@hidden

Martin Daley, CADcorp, WCS client software
address@hidden

Chris Higgins, EDINA, Edinburgh U., who is part of the UK NERSC initiative
address@hidden

Clemens Portele, Interactive Instruments, GML expert
address@hidden

Lucia Lovison-Golob, Harvard U., mainly interested in educational applications
address@hidden

Guenther Pichler, OGC
address@hidden

Dr, Peter Baumann, International Univ., Bremen
address@hidden

Mike Botts, U of Alabama Huntsville, has a WCS client that handles 3D datasets
address@hidden

Simon Evans, ESRI
address@hidden

Prof. Dr. Ralf Denzer, FachbereichGrandlagen, Infomatik Sensortechnik
Ralf. address@hidden

Those are the names and addresses I have.   I believe the people at
the Canadian firm Galdos are interested in the NcML-GML but Ron Lake
was not at the meeting.  IONIC would also seem to be a company that
should be interested, but I don't have any contacts.  Lorenzo may have
others names as well.