HR: 13:40h
AN: SF43B-01    [Abstracts]
TI: Integrating Science Information Systems with Geographic Information Systems: The OPeNDAP Experience
AU: * Cornillon, P
EM: pcornillon@gso.uri.edu
AF: Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island, Narragansett, RI 02882 United States
AU: Holloway, D
EM: dholloway@gso.uri.edu
AF: Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island, Narragansett, RI 02882 United States
AB: The OPeNDAP data access protocol is in increasing use for remote access to data in oceanography, meteorology, land cover studies and the space sciences. At the same time there is increasing use in the geographic information science (GIS) community of protocols to remotely access data. The fundamental difference between the two approaches for remote data access relates to the semantic metadata associated with the data. In the GIS case the semantic metadata are tightly coupled with the geographic needs of GISs, specifically, earth location, projection, etc. By contrast the OPeNDAP data access protocol does not impose a semantic metadata requirement on the data provider, although the protocol does provide a mechanism for the data provider to append semantic information to the data stream. This allows for use of the protocol over a much broader range of scientific disciplines, but also results in no consistency in the semantic metadata provided with the data. The OPeNDAP protocol could be viewed as a lower level protocol than those being developed for use in the GIS community. Despite the lack of consistency in semantic metadata there is a great deal of interest in the GIS community in access to OPeNDAP-enabled servers and conversely in the scientific community in access to GIS data via OPeNDAP-enabled clients. In this presentations we explore efforts undertaken within the OPeNDAP community to address these issues. In particular, we discuss issues related to access via the Web Mapping Server, EASy and MapServer as well as efforts to serve data stored in formats designed for use in GISs such as GeoTIFF
DE: 9820 Techniques applicable in three or more fields
SC: Special Focus: Advances in Data Acquisition, Management, Analysis and Display [SF]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting