Dapper in-situ conventions spec available

[John Caron]

Hi Joe, et al:

We have some various comments on this. Im wondering if you would prefer to have a seperate conversation on a possible new version of the spec, or just discuss the spec as it stands? I guess im wondering if this is the place to have the discussion Steve Hankins suggested:

(Steve's original email)

I'm seeking your thoughts here are on how the community can move rapidly towards the development of a written specification for the 2-level Sequence representation in OPeNDAP. (I'll refer to this below as the "DAP-2LS" conventions.)  It looks like the time may be right next year for pretty rapid growth in the use of OPeNDAP for conveying in-situ data.  Funding will probably be available for efforts along these lines.  A written specification is needed if the community is to take full advantage of these opportunities.

Between the DAPPER server and GDS there are successful example implementations to work from.  Many of the details of the specification (e.g. encoding of time) can probably be borrowed from CF.  The emerging PyDAP work promises to bring relational databases into the fold, too.

Clearly funding may be needed to entice someone to take on this task.  I believe that we can find a source of those funds in NOAA if we act quickly.  Even if only an initial, draft specification were to be developed at this time -- with community comments and discussion left to follow later -- this would be an important contribution.  Multiple venues for community discussion of CF-related conventions are taking form.  One at Unidata (by September?) will host discussions about unstructured grid (finite element) conventions.  Another at LLNL is getting started now to press forward with the CF conventions for more complex curvilinear grids.  With an initial specification of DAP-2LS conventions in hand I imagine we can entice someone to host a community discussion, since access to observations is important to everyone.

   - steve

P.S. I am just cheer-leading this effort. I do not expect be directly involved, myself.  The pay-off to the community -- advancing data interoperability, OPeNDAP, the Common Data Model, etc. etc. -- just seems too big to ignore. "