Minutes of Telecon 20 July 2010

Attendees

• Bruce Bannerman
• Bob Wilson
• Jeremy Tandy (chair)
• Bruce Wright

Agenda

1) Australian Emergency Response Services

BobW described the OGC web services that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology have established to provide weather information to the emergency services (30 organisations, 100 users - each state has its own), which uses WMS and WFS to provide radar, cyclone tracks, surface pressure, infrared imagery, etc and associated metadata. The OGC web services were set up to give the Emergency managers the same look and feel as the web pages (i.e. the WMS looks the same). They did not do much data modelling, as the Tropical Cyclone data model as inherited from BoM system, but these data are now converted to GML. The work is targeted for WMO Region V, and it recognized that the specific semantics may prevent interoperability across other regions. It will be useful to link this work to the MO.DWG UC4 produced by John Schattel, to try to provide a more generic use case.

• NEW ACTION A49: BobW to review UC4: multi-model ensemble forecasting to reduce or mitigate impacts of landfalling hurricane and provide input into it.

2) Historical Climate Data

BB described the 'WIRADA 1.6' framework activity, which he (from BoM) and Ryan Fraser (CSIRO, Perth) were leading on (Ryan works in Rob Woodcock's team, which includes Simon Cox (& Rob Atkinson on a part time basis). This activity covers historical climate data (temperature, precipitation, wind speed & direction and surface pressure) and water data (described using WaterML 2.0). This aims to provide a WFS and gridded data via WCS, with:

• Iteration 1: simple features (should have something in place in 6 months)
• Iteration 2: complex features with a domain model

They already have a prototype providing 20-years of extremes data via a WFS. They are using the approach taken with GeoSciML, and the work involves a team who have delivered a 'Spatial Information Services Stack' based on Open Source software to deliver GeoSciML at a number of Australian State Geoscience agencies. It is hoped to also engage other members of this team, notably Bruce Simmons who has been involved with that community since its early days and has a good understanding of what is required to successfully deliver spatial data models and community schema, as well as building communities as well. It may also be possible to involve Simon Cox (perhaps) and Rob Atkinson. The WFS prototype has already been successful in getting local folk interested in this subject, who previously thought the existing standards (e.g. GRIB, BUFR) were sufficient.

3) Climate Challenge Interoperability Pilot Phase 2 (CCIP-2)

(Additional information below was cribbed from BB's posting to the mailing list)

BB described the Climate Challenge Interoperability Pilot Phase 2 (CCIP-2), which is a follow-on from the Climate Challenge Integration Plugfest - 2009, which took place at FOSS4G last year. There is now ongoing dialogue with several key people at OGC on taking this forward, and it has been agreed that CCIP-2 will be managed by the OGC and will operate within their Interoperability Program. The aim is to get a panel of eminent scientists to guide this and future CCIP activities and to get this on the Commission For Climatology's agenda (hopefully via an appropriate OPACE Expert Team). The main aim of CCIP-2 is to get back to basics with open spatial standards interoperability of Climate data and:

• Work with several Climate / Met organisations around the world to stand up services exposing selected data sets via OGC Services (SOS or WFS, WCS and WMS); the initial datasets are Precipitation; Temperature; Wind direction and speed; and Air Pressure;
• Ensure that there is appropriate data provenance for each dataset with metadata meeting the WMO Core Profile of ISO 19115 and served via CSW; and
• Establish a simple portal that can consume the services from each participating organisation and conduct simple queries across all datasets.

The hope is that this will demonstrate that climate data can be effectively communicated with OGC web services and why a community agreed schema for climate data is a desirable goal, which will, in turn, help drum up more support for such activities. The approach is similar to what the GeoSciML community call a testbed. They used it effectively to test and refine GeoSciML on a number of occasions. The next step is to try & force people to stand up services that conform to the community schema; tha aim is to have 4 WFS & several WCS and a simple portal to consume data from participating organisations. The activity will run over a 6-12 month period with a set of goals & objectives (use cases). However, sponsorship is required from a number of organizations (US$350k in total) for management fees & seed funding for vendors to support the activity (particularly helping organisations stand up these services). BB saw the MO.DWG getting involved in the development of the Climate Community Schema in future (assuming that there is sufficient interest) and helping test and validate such activities as the CCIP-2.

• NEW ACTION A50: JT to talk to Met Office climate folk to drive international support for CCIP-2
• NEW ACTION A51: BB to send JT the details of the next CCIP-2 telecon
• NEW ACTION A52: JT to get involved in next CCIP-2 telecon in 2-3 weeks time

4) UC7: Climate assessment based on past data

On reviewing, UC7, BB suggested that the case was missing lots of activities that people would do (e.g. looking at anomalies, extremes etc), and he could provide a package of information from the BoM Climate and Water Division.

• NEW ACTION A53: BB to send JT the a package of information from the BoM Climate and Water Division on UC7 (Past Climate Data) activities

JT used UC7 to describe the process he was following: i.e. to use the UC to identify candidate data objects, map these to O&M and then look at mapping to existing formats, to define the edge cases that break interoperabilityand understanding to map between the different vocabs. BB pointed out that you may not have authoritative definitions of elements within datasets for BUFR & GRIB which will force you to use the richer model from O&M/SOS (especially if you want to chain services together through WPS), and suggested the need to also consider mapping to WFS, WMS, WCS and SOS for this reason. JT and BW had not seen any examples of SOS since the 52degrees North prototype several years ago. BB advised that 52degrees North ran a prototype for CCIP-2009 at FOSS4G-2009 last year (post meeting note: a different branch of CSIRO (to that mentioned above) also piloted SOS services for CCIP-2009).

• NEW ACTION A54: BB to identify current situation with the SOS deployments

BoM Climate & Water division will request that CSIRO get involved plus some resource from BoM itself.

• NEW ACTION A55: BB to promote the involvement of CSIRO and BoM in UC7 (Past Climate Data)

5) Times of Australian Telcons

Current 6.00 UTC slot is problematic for some UK participants, so Andrew Woolf had suggested(via JT) 7.30 UTC (8.30 UK & 17.30 Aus), to be reviewed when daylight savings change. BB suggested a compromise of 7.00 UTC...or alternating early & late fortnightly (11.00 UTC & 7.00 UTC).

• NEW ACTION A56: JT to consider revised telcon times

6) Next Telcon

• US/Europe 27 July 2010 14:00 UTC
• Aus/Europe 3 August 2010 06:00 UTC (to be confirmed)

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-- BruceWright - 20 Jul 2010