As you are probably aware, I'm not a metocean person so am a lurker on these
conversations. But are "most GIS users" the target audience for metocean data?
My science background is solid earth. We work in 3-D a lot. But we don't make
a lot of use of GIS systems - usually only when demanded by project sponsors.
Mostly we are loading and unloading from specialized 3-D software. The benefit
of standard interfaces like the OGC ones is cross-domain data a vailability,
and emerging software libraries.
Traditional GIS is pretty hopeless in 3-D, and not great on time-series either. So to me it would
seem to be of quesionable relevance to serious geoscience applications, particularly simulation and
modelling. Now you may want GIS users to have access to some 2-D sections, so I guess they might
be clients of a 2-D coverage service. But I wouldn't expect the "major GIS vendors" to
have much interest in anyt hing more elaborate. Is there a "2-D geospatial profile" of
netCDF?
Best - Simon
At the moment my experience is that most GIS users use desktop
packages by the major vendors. I've seen some use of FOSS but not all
that much yet to be honest - but I haven't done a big survey or
anything. Maybe the situation will change and/or maybe I just have
limited experience.
What did you have in mind?
Best wishes, Jon
