Thanks to all for your leadership and vision in all this....Glenn
John Caron wrote:
Tennessee Leeuwenburg wrote:
Hi guys,
We're looking at phase two of the project I'm working on at the
moment. Phase one involved hooking up our weirdo database to
OpenDAP, and it looks that that will be a success. There's one thing
that's not as wonderful as we might hope, and a couple of cool extra
things we'd like to do.
In order to cope with observational data stored in BUFR format,
we've had to write scripts for conversion to NetCDF prior to serving
it with thredds. I don't really like messing about in thredds code
if I can help it, on account of it makes code maintainance that much
harder. So we convert to NetCDF on a product-by-product basis. But
it would be way cool if we could serve BUFR data more generally and
without the conversion step. So my question is : does anyone on this
list care much about BUFR data, and is anyone thinking much about
how it might fit into an OpenDAP context?
What kind of data is stored in BUFR?
We have an "I/O service provider" framework in netcdf-java version
2.2, where you can read non-native files as if they are netcdf files.
We have done GRIB files in this way, among others. It would probably
be very cool to be able to do that for BUFR files. If you're
interested i can tell you more.
The other angle is from the GIS world rather than the data sharing
world. We'd love to publish some of our data sets in such a way that
GIS packages can read them. To the best of my knowledge, no GIS
package reads OpenDAP or even NetCDF. This means we've either got to
do a conversion step from NetCDF into something that the GIS
packages can read, and then serve it out using a different server -
like a shapefile server for instance. So we would have to choose
specific products to make available, provide shapefile derivatives
from our hi-res NetCDF data, and tell people to go look there. It's
not the worst plan I've ever heard, but has anyone here heard about
any efforts to integrate OpenDAP more tightly with GIS software?
The next version of the THREDDS server will have OpenDAP integrated
into it. It will also have an experimental WCS server for gridded
data. The idea is that anything that can be read in through
netcdf-java version 2.2 can be served through opendap. If theres
enough georeferencing, these can also be served through WCS. Again it
would be cool to extend this to a WFS server for features, although
it would be a lot of work.
We are also working with ESRI on their project to read in netcdf
gridded files, and another project with GDAL/Cadcorp experimenting
with netcdf over WCS. Still both in research stage.
--
Glenn K. Rutledge
NOMADS Program Manager
NOAA Meteorologist / Physical Scientist
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
National Climatic Data Center
151 Patton Ave
Asheville, North Carolina 28801
(828) 271-4097
The contents of this message are mine personally and do not
necessarily reflect any position of the Government or the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration."