Bryan,
I was lucky to hear Andrew Woolf talk about CSML a couple of weeks
ago in Boulder. I really liked his talk and think I understand the
benefits of keeping data in netCDF. I am thinking about the
representation of the spatial features themselves in the netCDF file
and thinking that good things might happen if we thought about the
general class of geographic features as a single class rather than as
separate points, lines, ... In that case, we already have a well
established and widely used standard for storing that information.
The reason i said that the connection to spatial databases was
straightforward is because the well-known binary representation of
the features is actually the native binary representation of features
in PostGIS, which is a database that I expect many in the netCDF
crowd would be interested in using. In addition to having the same
binary representation, all spatial databases understand the simple
features spec which would be easy to support if we used WKT inside of
the netCDF or HDF5 files.
I think that CSML would have an important role as a transport or as
essentially an XML wrapper around these netCDF files, but I don't
understand it completely.
Ted
On Oct 12, 2007, at 9:57 AM, Bryan Lawrence wrote:
Well, it's not that ridiculously straightforward :-(
CSML: The climate sciences *modelling* language, is the first (as
far as we
know) attempt to build a *model* of climate science features
("beyond" lines
polygons etc, but "less than" grids) which are consistent with the
geospatial
communities ideas (especially as expressed in GML, but based on the
underlying ISO and OGC standards) see http://ndg.nerc.ac.uk/csml ...
But, having done that, we still have to store the underlying binary
data, and
for that we prefer netCDF, and that does bring us back to
initiatives like
this. I don't think we can escape these thought processes :-) ...
which will
then feedback to iniatives like CSML and on a longer time scale, the
harmonisation of the Unidata SDM, CSML and OGC fundamentals ...
Cheers
Bryan
