Highlights and Conclusions of the Unidata OGC Interoperability Day

At the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) Technical Committee meetings, Unidata hosted a special Interoperability Day workshop to address the use of web services via standard interfaces for accessing a broad range of environmental data. These interfaces include: WCS (Web Coverage Service), WFS (Web Feature Service, SOS (Sensor Observation Service, CS-W/ebRIM (Catalog Service for the Web / electronic business Registry Information Model) for providing access to data currently served via THREDDS (THematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services), OPeNDAP (Open source Project for a Network Data Access Protocol), netCDF-CF (network Common Data Form - Climate and Forecast conventions) and IDD/LDM (Internet Data Distribution / Local Data Manager) technologies. The primary data served includes weather, climate and ocean data from the community sometimes referred to as Fluid Earth Sciences (FES). An international set of representatives from industry, government, and academia, spanning many geosciences disciplines participated actively in the workshop and are committed to continued collaboration. The overall objective for the day was to come up with practical and concrete ideas for how to deliver various classes of FES data via web services through the standard interfaces. The primary focus was on gridded datasets (e.g., forecast model output) and station/observation/point datasets (e.g. the observational data collected at weather stations, ocean buoys, river gaging stations. As time allowed, other categories (profile/trajectory, swath, radial, unstructured grids) were addressed. The main objective was to come up with a realistic plan for dealing with gridded and station/observation/point datasets. Then the remaining categories can be addressed incrementally. This presentation summarizes the highlights of the Interoperability Day and the resulting plans for future implementation and testing.