OPeNDAP infrastructure in European Operational Oceanography

This slide deck was presented as part of the OPeNDAP Developer's Workshop, Winter 2007 that was held from February 21-23, 2007 at the NCAR Foothills Laboratory in Boulder, CO. 

Abstract: 

IFREMER is involved in distributed data management through many different European oceanography projects. These projects aim at setting up infrastructures for European ocean observation data management (Seadatanet, Cersat), at setting up core services for ocean monitoring and forecasting (Mersea) or fulfilling specific requirements for thematic usage (Interrisk, Humboldt : oil spill monitoring). In these projects OPeNDAP is a de facto standard for data access in distributed systems. As examples we will review the effective and foreseen usages of the OPeNDAP protocol in the Seadatanet and Mersea projects.

The Seadatanet project (http://www.seadatanet.org) aims at setting up a pan-european network federating 48 marine data centres. In this project, OPeNDAP will be used :

1. to define features (specific models) for the managed data types (vertical profiles, under track observations, ...)
2. to access metadata and populate catalogues
3. to access and visualize data.

In order to assess interoperability with equivalent networks, Seadatanet is very concerned in all OPeNDAP tentatives on marine in-situ observation conventions studies.

The Mersea project (http://www.mersea.eu.org) aims at setting up a virtual distributed ocean forecasting centre federating results from the main European operational observation and forecasting centres. In this distributed system, OPeNDAP (usually TDS servers) is used by every data providers for data dissemination. It is useful as a low level service used by more advanced services such as visualization. It is also planned to use OPeNDAP servers in order to build a distributed download service. This latest function has to implement access restriction and single sign on over the distributed servers. OPeNDAP is usually used as a B2B protocol (business to business) more than a B2C (business to client). To improve end-users access to the OPeNDAP data flow some initiatives are starting in the Mersea framework. A simple OPeNDAP client with a simple GUI assistant to build the request and save the data as netCDF files is now being developed. This latest software will enable the Mersea download service authentification.

AGENDA OF THE WORKSHOP 

[Almost all of the presentation listed here are available in the OPeNDAP Community Zenodo library.] 

Wednesday February 21, 2007

Session 1

0900-1000 OPeNDAP Current Status

• Introduction by Peter Fox, President of OPeNDAP

1000-1015 Break

Session 2 (moderator: P. Fox)

1015-1200 The OPeNDAP 4 Data Server (aka Hyrax)

• James Gallagher and Nathan Potter - Customizing and Extending Hyrax
• Patrick West - Harnessing the power of the Server 4 Back-End Server modular framework
• Jose H. Garcia - Numerical Grid Computations with the OPeNDAP Back End Server (BES)
• Patrick West - OPeNDAP Server 4 Back-End Server Authentication and Authorization

Lunch 1215-1330

Session 3 (moderator: P. Cornillon)

1330-1530 Security

• John Relph and Kenneth S. Casey - Software Development and Security at NOAA
• John Caron - The THREDDS Data Server and OPeNDAP security
• Tim Pugh - BMRCs OPeNDAP data service, how far can it reach?
• Discussion

1530-1545 Break

Session 4 (moderator: J. Gallagher)

1545-1730 Semantics

• Benno Blumenthal- Using an RDF framework to carry metadata for datasets
• Rob Raskin - SWEET - an upper-level ontology for Earth and Space Sciences
• (withdrawn) Luis Bermudez - MMI and CF
• Peter Fox - OPeNDAP and semantics
• Discussion

Dinner

No-host dinner, Cafe Gondolier

Thursday February 22, 2007

Session 5 (moderator: D. Holloway)

0900-1030 APIs and Clients

• Roberto De Almeida - Data Access Protocol meets Python
• Peter Cornillon - The Matlab OPeNDAP GUI Suite

1030-1100 Break

• Poster: Denis Nadeau - Enhancing Access to NASA Satellite Data OGC Web Services using OPeNDAP.

Session 5 continued

1100-1215 APIs and Clients (continued)

• John Chamberlain - OPeNDAP: User Versus Programmatic Access
• Greg Janee - Data Discovery in a Distributed Environment and Darren Hardy's AGU presentation.

Lunch 1215-1315

Session 6 (moderator: P. Cornillon)

1315-1445 Data Providers

• Roy Mendelssohn - OPeNDAP at ERD with suggestions for future development
• Jim Potemra - IPRC data transport, LAS and EPIC server
• Christopher Lynnes - OPeNDAP Developments at the Goddard Earth Sciences DISC
• Thomas LOUBRIEU - OPeNDAP in European oceanography data management

Session 7 (moderator: N. Potter)

1445-1715 Server-Side Operations with 1530-1600 Break

• Wenli Yang - The ROSES ACCESS OPeNDAP/OGC Gateway Project
• Roland Schweitzer - Server-side OPeNDAP Analysis - A General Approach Utilizing Legacy Applications through TDS
• Daniel L. Wang - Server-side Data Reduction and Analysis with Script Workflow Analysis for MultiProcessing (SWAMP)
• Thomas LOUBRIEU - Dap4cor: A Dapper-like server for CORIOLIS in-situ data centre

Dinner

Dinner on your own

Friday February 23, 2007

Session 9 (moderator: P. Fox)

0900-0930 Server-side functions (continued)

• James Gallagher - Server-side Functions for Geo-spatial Selection

0930-1200 Strategies and Directions

• Discussion (with nominal time allocations) focusing on...
• community forums for deciding on standards processes within (and beyond) the OPeNDAP community, who is involved, timeframe, prototypes, etc. (1hr)
• security (20min)
• semantics (profiles, vocabularies) (20min)
• server-side (aggregation) (20min)
• response types (e.g. get_capabilities) (20min)
• metrics (10min)
• others: gateways, Server4, TDS and other general direction issues

Lunch

Hyrax Tutorial (FL2/1001): 1300-1630

Dinner

No-host dinner, location TBA