GALEON Phase 2: experimenting an interoperability framework between netCDF and the geospatial information communities

The OGC GALEON (Geo-interface for Air, Land, Environment, Ocean NetCDF) Phase 2 Interoperability Experiment has the primary objective to test the applicability and effectiveness of the revisions incorporated into WCS 1.1 for serving netCDF datasets. To accomplish this objective, we expect a major contribution from testing crosswalks between standards adopted by the netCDF and Geo-Information communities. The netCDF community is characterized by the following data and metadata content and encoding models and related services: CF-netCDF extended data model; THREDDS catalog protocol and data model; OPeNDAP access protocol and data model; ncML encoding model. The Geospatial Information community adopts the content and encoding models and the related access and catalog services defined by ISO TC211 (i.e. 19100 standard series) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC); among them: ISO 19123:coverage, 19115:metadata, OGC WCS protocol and data model; OGC CSW.ebRIM protocol and data model; 19128: Web map server interface, 19136: Geography Markup Language (GML) encoding model, 19139: Metadata - XML schema implementation. Indeed, there is a clear need to establish a solid interoperability framework between these two important communities. In fact, the netCDF community itself is really multidisciplinary - spanning several realms, including atmospheric sciences, oceanography, hydrology, etc. The Geospatial Information community is becoming more and more important in the present Internet era. In fact, access to real-time distributed geospatial