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NOTICE: This version of the NSF Unidata web site (archive.unidata.ucar.edu) is no longer being updated.
Current content can be found at unidata.ucar.edu.
To learn about what's going on, see About the Archive Site.
----- Original Message ----- > This time is fine. I would ask perhaps some background on " Unidata, DLESE, > and THREDDS" so that I can orient my comments accordingly. In general, I can > do an overview of the OGC and the process, provide an overview of the > membership, and then dive into the OGC Interoperability Program > (collaborative testbeds and pilots) and how organizations work together to > develop interface specifications in support of geospatial data, service, and > application interoperability. I will also give a short overview of the > current OGC Interoperability Initiatives. Also, how much time will I have?? > > Thanks > > Carl Hi Carl: Heres an attempt at describing where "Unidata, DLESE, and THREDDS" are at and why we are interested in GIS at this point. One of Unidata's primary missions has been to provide software and other kinds of technical support to scientific data providers. DLESE is creating a digital library to support earth science education, focusing on K-12. THREDDS is a Unidata project to add scientific datasets to digital libraries such as DLESE. So THREDDS is trying to marry the expertise that Unidata has about scientific data and how to access it, with the expertise that DLESE has about digital libraries. More broadly, THREDDS is trying to find ways to connect the "scientific data provider community" and the "digital library community". These 2 communities have different ontologies and different technology bases. There are deep questions about how to represent scientific data within and between these 2 communities. Since thats a hard problem, we thought we should complicate matters by adding in the "GIS community" to the mixture ;^} Seriously, there is much interest in GIS per se, and also in the data models that the GIS community is developing. So before we take too many steps forward, we hope to understand where THREDDS might also connect to GIS efforts. Specifically, we are asking ourselves how much we can build on the OGC and/or ISO9115(?) data models. We are especially interested in the possibility of using XML representations for data interchange. > From the outside, and here I am just stating my own personal opinion, it looks like much of the OGC metadata work, in particular georeferencing, may be useful. Its not as clear what to do about the data itself; scientific datasets are often very large, and various client/server protocols have evolved to handle that problem as efficiently as possible. Typically application design is driven by this need. It appears that the GIS community (as well as the W3C XML work) has not focused on these large binary datasets too much. Perhaps the data provider community can make a contribution here. I'd like to encourage anyone else on the thredds maillist to add their perspectives on how these 3 communities (data provider, digital library, GIS) can connect. John Caron
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