GALEON Phase 2: Testing Gateways Between Formal Standard Interfaces and Existing Community Standard Client/server Implementations

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Coverage Service (WCS) revision 1.1 specification includes many modifications that are important to the communities working with existing services and clients based on netCDF (network Common Data Form), THREDDS THematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services), OPeNDAP Open-source Project for Network Data Access Protocol), and ADDE (Abstract Data Distribution Envrironment) technologies. Chief among the WCS changes is the requirement that WCS binary encoding formats have documented application profiles. NetCDF will be among the first WCS binary encoding format profiles. In addition, WCS 1.1 enables 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), non-spatial dimension (e.g., pressure or density), irregular grids. In Phase 2 of the GALEON (Geo-interface for Land, Environment, Earth, Ocean NetCDF) Interoperability experiment, the participants will 1. Implement and test clients and servers that conform to the new WCS 1.1 spec and experiment with them on a wide range of real-world datasets. 2. Test the OGC CS-W (Catalog Services for the Web) as a means for accessing lists of datasets available on WCS servers. as well as WCS. As an illustration of the challenge, the top level 3. Evaluate various OGC GML (Geography Markup Language) dialects as a means for representing the information in netCDF datasets. This will include: ncML-GML (netCDF Markup Language-GML), CSML (Climate Sciences Modeling Language), and GMLJP2 (GML for JPEG 2000). Many of the datasets and catalogs for these experiements will be from existing netCDF, THREDDS, OPeNDAP, and ADDE servers.