On Aug 24, 2009, at 7:41 AM, Roy Mendelssohn wrote:
Wouldn’t you gain in getting more active in OGC standard groups
that try to address the same issues as NetCDF before making up your
mind??
Or perhaps OGC should have gotten more involved in existing
processes and standards instead of reinventing the wheel, and most
importantly ignoring how the community actually uses and thinks
about their data.
I am also aware of some of the SWE test beds, and for the purposes
of how we use data, have yet to see one that is actually
operational (as opposed to on paper) that meets our needs. Several
existing community standards and services do indeed meet these, but
better we let the spec designers from outside the community decide
for us.
The first sentence here is key: a specification has to meet the needs,
and either be operational or easily be made so. ("Fitness for a
particular use" is a key concept for me.) A specification that is fit
for a particular purpose is worth its weight in gold, OK, even more
than that. NetCDF/OPeNDAP are extremely fit for many purposes, IMHO.
But the cited text above does not appear to allow the possibility that
the NetCDF and OPeNDAP are not fit for *all* purposes; nor that many
of the people who are involved in OGC are also involved with NetCDF
systems and specifications, and have been for some time; nor that the
people who are involved with OGC *have* identified communities that
use and think about their data in the ways that some OGC systems
support.
Please note that NONE of my comment is casting any aspersion on NetCDF/
OPeNDAP, nor expressing any opinion about one of these groups of
specifications being better than the other. They are targeting really
different communities, functional capabilities, and environments.
There is a lot that they can productively adopt from each other, if I
may say so, and in some cases have adopted already.
(In another venue I just edited a document that emphasized ISO
standards as the up and coming worldwide standard. The two things I
added to my version were netCDF/OPeNDAP, and OGC SWE. And there will
be others that are particularly fit for other purposes, like perhaps
TAPIR for biodiversity.)
So the point is, it's a big tent, and if anyone in it thinks their
specification, standards body, or community of interest has the only
and final answer, it probably suggests there are other parts of the
tent they have yet to explore. (And it occurs to me, it could be neat
if the developers of the two groups of specifications under discussion
get to do that together sometime.)
John
Just for info, we have about 20TB of data online and growing, and
serve data worldwide,
-roy
**********************
"The contents of this message do not reflect any position of the
U.S. Government or NOAA."
**********************
Roy Mendelssohn
Supervisory Operations Research Analyst
NOAA/NMFS
Environmental Research Division
Southwest Fisheries Science Center
1352 Lighthouse Avenue
Pacific Grove, CA 93950-2097
e-mail: Roy.Mendelssohn@xxxxxxxx (Note new e-mail address)
voice: (831)-648-9029
fax: (831)-648-8440
www: http://www.pfeg.noaa.gov/
"Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill."
"From those who have been given much, much will be expected"
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