Summary of October 2005 GALEON Telecon
October Telecon Summary
Summary of GALEON Gateway Implementation Teleconference
of October 19, 2005
Draft by Ben Domenico last updated: October 21, 2005 (Bigagli)
Participants:
- John Evans of NASA
- Gerry Creager of Texas A&M
- Frank Warmerdam of CadCorp
- Norman Barker and David Burridge of RSI, UK
- Lorenzo Bigagli of U of Florence and Italian IMAA/CNR
- Ben Burford, consultant for Japanese Space Agency
- Peter Baumann of International U Bremen
- Rudy Husar and Stefan Falke of Washington U in St. Louis
- Sean Forde of Lizardtech
- John Caron and Ben Domenico from Unidata
Introductions:
Rudy Husar and Stefan Falke of Washington University in St. Louis are new to the GALEON team and this was their first teleconference. Washington University is a member of the OGC so they can participate in the formal interface specification aspect of GALEON as well as the gateway implementation and testing. Rudy said they are primarily interested in connecting to datasets from the client side, but they are also serving some datasets via WMS and WFS services.
Issues:
It was noted that the George Mason U server was not in the client/server table in the wiki. It has since been added as another column (although the formatting may not be perfect yet.)
Several server accessability problems were noted.
The Unidata THREDDS server (motherlode.ucar.edu) URL was incorrect on the wiki page and has been fixed.
There is also a problem with access to some of the files on motherlode via the WCS interface. This is being investigated by John Caron.
Likewise there were access problems to some of the files on the U of Florence server. Lorenzo Bigagli encouraged interactions with the WCS-G and indicated that the files on that server are specifically constructed to illustrate and validate mappings from netCDF model to GML model. Other netCDF datasets will be made available via that server later. Lorenzo is investigating the access problems.
Norman Barker pointed out that the mapserver package can read netCDF but was interested in knowing whether it could be configured to write the netCDF locally. Gerry Creager said Texas A&M is experimenting with such a writing function and Frank Warmerdam voluteered to help out with the work.
Concern was expressed that the GALEON WCS servers would "disappear" after the end of the GALEON interoperability experiment. This would be a problem for groups attempting to demonstrate the usefulness of serving netCDF via WCS next year. The teleconference participants who operate server sites said they intend to keep their servers up indefinitely but that most of them are experiemental so they are subject to change and might be up and down from time to time. Anyone who needs to have the servers up and running for a given period after GALEON would do well to let the server operators know a day or two in advance.
Other Updates:
Ben Burford is looking for demonstrations of the usefulness of serving a variety of netCDF files on WCS servers and accessing them with several different clients. He is starting with the GMU client and would benefit from GALEON participants documenting the collections of datasets available on their WCS servers.
It was pointed out that another public domain WCS client (GV6) is available and there was general agreement it would be good to bring this into the GALEON experiments.
Peter Baumann indicated their WCS server is still under development, but that it would be available by the end of the year.
Plans for the November OGC Technical Committee Meeting in Bonn
Sean Forde has arranged for a GALEON hour during the IES working group session on Wednesday, November 9, in the morning.
Of the teleconference participants, Sean Forde, Peter Baumann, John Evans, Lorenzo Bigagli, and Ben Domenico will be at the TC meeting.. Norman Barker and David Burridge would participate if arrangements were made for a teleconference.