Tuesday, 16 January 2007: 11:00 AM
Evolving standards for interdisciplinary data integration
217A (Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center)
Evolving standard interfaces for web services are facilitating interdsciplinary research by making it possible for client analysis and display applications to use common protocols for accessing data from a wide variety of distributed data servers. In particular, the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) Web Coverage Service (WCS) interface specification is undergoing modifications that make it possible to access data atmospheric and ocean sciences datasets in the commonly used netCDF form using the CF (Climate and Forecast) conventions. Many of the updates to the WCS protocol have resulted from the GALEON (Geo-interface for Air, Land, Environment, Oceans NetCDF)Interoperability Experiment conducted within the auspices of the OGC. Among the changes introduced in WCS 1.1 are: multiple fields in a coverage, 3 spatial dimensions, 2 time dimensions (e.g., the time a forecast was run and the forecast times within the run), relative time (e.g., the latest image, the last 5 images, ...), non-spatial dimension (e.g., pressure or density), irregular grids. The paper provides examples illustrating how the standard interfaces enable integration of dispirate datasets via a number of different client data analysis and display applications.
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