Using OGC's WCS2.0 to Extract Real Rime Metadata:-

Using OGC's WCS2.0 to Extract Real Time Metadata:-

P. Trevelyan, and Rachel Prudden Met Office, Exeter, United Kingdom

The most obvious use of the OGC's Web Coverage Service is to extract data by subsetting/slicing etc., but it can also provide a rich set of metadata. The Met Office has implemented a prototype WCS with the proposed Met-Ocean extension to provide a real time description of current NWP (Numerical Weather Prediction) data available in XML.

Traditionally such metadata was only available by using a dedicated “thick client”, but by using three services, i.e. GetCapabilities, DescribeCoverageCollection (a Met-Ocean extension) and DescribeCoverage the “run time” metadata may accessed remotely. The status of any model run can thus be monitored, in real time and easily consumed by a client having access to the data server using OGC WCS services.

These three services return increasingly detailed descriptions and therefore allow for a customisation. The new “coverage collections” provides a way of describing at a high level, the contents of a model or model series. This real time “harvesting” of metadata in a machine-able form is important in order to provide the status and description of a model run, as well as provide input into a catalogue using standard OGC interfaces.

This presentation will describe our experiences with live production metadata and include examples taken from a real time implementation. The structure of the metadata is based on OGC's O&M model, but there will need to be further work to provide a Met-Ocean best practice and this will also be discussed.