Re: Absence of key scientific spatial data formats within common formats to implementation of Best Practices [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

Hi Bruce,

On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 1:41 PM, Bruce Bannerman <B.Bannerman@bom.gov.au>
wrote:

> Hi Ed,
>
> I think that the concept of 'small' is relative.
>
> Perhaps the intended audience is 'small' by Google standards. However, we
> find that our website is one of the most visited in Australia. People are
> interested in the weather, climate, etc.
>
> The domains that we work in relate to concepts that don't just occur at a
> single location and we try to understand what is happening, analyse results
> and make predictions on a regional and often global basis.
>

Yes this is true. To add to this, latency of such data is another factor
which permits our data consumers to perform a wide variety of analysis
tasks such as perform climate model analysis for a particular variable,
over a certain region (or globally as stated by Bruce) over the last 25
years.


>
> This is really another variant of the multidimensional coverage issue. The
> formats that Lewis has mentioned are coverage formats.
>

Yes


>
> While I personally believe that the OGC WCS suite of related standards
> (including also WPS and WMS) will be very useful as described by Peter
> Baumann. We will still need a payload to exchange the actual
> multi-dimensional data and the formats discussed are a good starting point.
>
> Again personally, I think that the piece of the puzzle that we are missing
> is being able to adequately describe the often quite complex semantics
> associated with the data.
>

For me right now Bruce, your sentence above is the crux of the issue I want
to engage with in this WG effort. I am aware that many communities have
been trying this for a long time however I hope that by taking, applying
and adapting (if need be) the SDWBP for a few sample studies I can really
see what areas work and which ones need improvement.


>
> While we are developing a good approach at being able to describe the
> semantics using Application Schema based on Observations and Measurements,
> Timeseries, etc (as described on this list by Simon Cox), we have still to
> find a way to effectively link this description of the observed property
> through to coverages that have often been derived from collections of such
> observations at points in time.
>
> The semantics of the observations are increasingly based on a community of
> practice's agreed concepts and descriptions, as per the WaterML and
> GeoSciML examples provided earlier in this thread.
>
> See the SDWWG use case on climate data and data provenance for a better
> description.
>

For those interested this issue is
http://w3c.github.io/sdw/UseCases/SDWUseCasesAndRequirements.html#ProvenanceOfClimateData
Bruce describeds the problem from the Meteorological perspective
comprehensively and also leaves us with a very tantalizing "...The missing
part is: How can the provenance of the collection of climate data and the
software used to manipulate it be best modeled and in the future, found via
the Internet? The resolution of this issue will be of relevance to many
domains."
When I requested to submit one of NASA JPL's use cases (which I must admit
would have been on a similar strand to that provided by Bruce) I would have
done so with the intention of posing the same question Bruce has done. This
is a huge issue for us. We host so many datasets which are extremely
important to everyone for better understanding a variety of topics related
to earth science. We cannot however seem to engage with the agenda of
producing linked data describing sensor readings, etc. There is a lot of
work to do here.


>
> So I don't think that we can dismiss this issue as belonging to a small
> isolated use case with a small potential audience.
>

Agreed. The agenda Bruce and I are bringing to the surface here is huge and
extremely important for us all (regardless of whether we work directly with
the named data formats or not). I feel that the WG would be doing a huge
injustice if it were not to engage with this agenda.

Maybe, we could form a sub group, just as has been done with other topics,
to address this area? Just a thought.
Thanks.
Lewis