Hi all,
this discussion is very valuable to the WCS group, it certainly will
impact our discussions.
John Caron wrote:
There is still a hope that core + say, geotiff would be a good LCD (lowest
common denominator) to strive for
Interesting; actually one argument for us to avoid any format encoding
in the core was that other communities should not be bothered with
formats they are not interested in. Good to know that you folks like
Geotiff :-)
Still, however, there is further communities. In future WCS is intended
to cover all the spatiotemporal dimensions equally, which includes any
subset of the xyzt axes. In particular: "time-only" coverages will be
supported, particularly having in mind the SWE community. (On a side
note, there will be a dedicated harmonization meeting at the next TC
meeting in Valencia where SWE's O&M and the WCS coverage model will talk
to each other, among others.)
Now environmental sensoring people might implement a WCS supporting 1-D
time series which never will offer 2-D coverages; IMHO we should not
force them into supporting Geotiff. Notably this is not only about
plugging in open-source libtiff. It concerns coordinate conversion,
interpolation, etc - in short: a hell of a lot of work, in their case
just for nothing.
Bottom line, we could not find any format which all communities
uniformly are interested in, so we factored it out.
-Peter
