OGC "Geo-interface for Atmosphere, Land, Earth, and Ocean netCDF" (GALEON) Interoperability Experiment

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OGC "Geo-interface for Atmosphere, Land, Earth,
and Ocean netCDF" (GALEON) Interoperability
Experiment

• 7th September 2005
• Norman Barker (RSI)

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Community Context

• Many existing client/server data systems in the
  atmosphere, ocean sciences communities (AIS or
  ESIS)
• Standards evolving from original base in GIS
  community
• Standards based gateway needed between existing
  AIS data systems and traditional GIS world
• Overall objectives
• standard interfaces
• gateway implementation

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OGC Web Coverage Service

• OpenGIS specification with implementations by
  Ionic, GeoServer and Mapserver
• Allows temporal / spatial subsetting, and
  reprojection of underlying data using http
  requests
• Clients implemented by ESRI, Cadcorp, Ionic,
  qvSIG, uDig, and ongoing Unidata GALEON project
  to develop services and clients for netCDF data
• WCS is a superset of the functionality offered by
  a WMS allowing integration with thin web clients
• Server side is fully scalable.

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OpenGIS WCS netCDF Interface
Application
WCS
WFS
NetCDF Interface
GeoTIFF
OpenDAP
netCDF file
ADDE
GML
DTED
Static GIS Features
HDF-EOS
NITF
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Service Gateway Objectives

• Make communities aware of one another
• Build standard interface to the many
  netCDF/OPeNDAP data servers already in operation
• Allow traditional atmospheric / oceanography data
  providers to migrate toward one standards-based
  service
• Allow traditional GIS clients to access
  netCDF/OPeNDAP datasets via standards-based
  interface

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Interface Objectives

• Evaluate effectiveness of ncML-GML in WCS data
  encoding suggest extensions
• Evaluate netCDF/OPeNDAP as WCS data transport
  (encoding) mechanism suggest extension if
  warranted
• Investigate protocol adequacy for serving and
  interacting with (5D) datasets involving multiple
  parameters (e.g., temperature, pressure, wind
  speed and direction) in three spatial dimensions
  with two temporal (actual time, forecast time)
  dimensions

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5D Datasets
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Participants

• Unidata/UCAR
• University of Florence
• NASA Geospatial Interoperability Office
• George Mason University
• CadCorp
• ESRI
• JPL
• IMAA-CNR
• Interactive Instruments
• University of Applied Sciences
• International University Bremen
• NERC NCAS/British Atmospheric Data Center
• University of Alabama Huntsville
• Research Systems, Inc. (IDL)
• Texas AM University
• Initiating institutions

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Interested Observers

• EDINA Edinburgh U. Data Library
• Harvard University

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Non-member interest in Gateway Implementation

• University of Rhode Island (OPeNDAP group)
• Pacific Marine Environment Laboratory (PMEL)
• Center for Land, Ocean, Atmosphere (COLA)
• Marine Metadata Initiative lead by MBARI
  (Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute)
• GODAE (Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment)
  led by FNMOC (Fleet Numerical Meteorological and
  Oceanographic Center)
• Many current THREDDS/OPeNDAP server sites

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Timeline

• Startup
• GALEON WCS-THREDDS IE ad hoc Meeting (NYC TC)  
  January 19, 2005
• Activity Plan draft web publication   March 18,
  2005, revised May 11.
• Execution
• Review Board Review June 15, 2005
• 30-day public review
• Planned kickoff date (execution start
  date)   mid-July, 2005
• Status Updates intermittently online
• Update at next OGC TC meeting November, 2005
• Final testing and bug fixing    5 months after
  kickoff
• Planned end date  6 months after kickoff
• Unidata Gateway
• WCS gateway site serving NetCDF 5D gridded files.
  Datasets will be in THREDDS catalog, but with no
  OGC CSW catalog implementation. (GMU has plans
  for CSW catalog implementation) end of June, 205
• WCS server ready for other client testing end of
  July, 2005
• Experiment with netcdf in addition to geotiff
  starging August, 2005

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RSI GALEON Implementation

• Data Generation
• Data Ingestion
• Data Provision
• Data Access
• Data Visualization
• On-going Development and Support

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Software

• 3rd Party Software
• Web Server (Apache)
• Web Coverage Server (MapServer)
• Bespoke (RSI)
• System Admin/Ingestion Tool
• Visualization Tool
• System Integration

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Ingestion Tool

• Ingests NetCDF data into GDAL banded netCDF
  format for WCS delivery via MapServer
• Supports configurable multithreaded processing
• Accelerated ingestion using native system methods
  
• All transactions are logged and can be queried
  via the ingestion GUI
• Central database of ingested files allowing other
  systems to integrate with the file store

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MapServer WCS

• Open Source, based on GDAL
• Used extensively as a Web Map Service been
  available as a WCS for the last 18 months
• Fully tested with Landsat / DEM type geotiff
  data, MIMAS, EDINA, NERC and our experience
• This is the first use of this WCS for serving
  NetCDF data, work is beginning to be echoed by
  GALEON participants
• WCS makes the data store extensible to other
  clients who can parse XML responses and retrieve
  data via HTTP.

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Vizualisation Tool Overview

• Modular IDL Implementation
• Multi-View Layout
• Tab Sheets (1 per view)
• Animation Control
• Import
• WCS (via Data Access Dialog)
• Raw GeoTIFF Files
• Export
• Image (of View)
• MPEG (of View)

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Data Access GUI
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Vizualisation Tool GUI
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Vizualisation Tool Demo
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Results

• Interoperability between clients and server
• 3D temporal support for netCDF coverages
• IDL WCS client capability
• Free IDL client for netCDF data via WCS using the
  IDL Virtual Machine

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Plans

• WCS and IDL client has been released to the
  customer
• 40 years of climate netCDF data will be available
  via WCS using either the free IDL client, or
  A.N.Other WCS client in December
• Plans for IDL OpenGIS client functionality to be
  included in the IDL distribution
• Migration to true N-D coverage support

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Open Source Community Progress

• GDAL added netCDF driver (Denis Nadeau Frank
  Warmerdam)
• Geoserver added WCS support, and working towards
  N-D server client functionality (Simone
  Giannecchini)
• NCML-GML (Stefano Nativi)
• CSML (Andrew Woolf)

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Any Questions?