[ESP] ESP: Meeting Agenda

[Bryan Lawrence]

Hi Folks

> May I suggest that you go back to our NOMADS meetings in the Fall of
> 2002 at CDC where I believe most have agreed to some basics:
>
> http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/nomads/faq.html
>
> You'll notice one of the goals is to have a Unified Web presence.  

The latter might well be a NOMADS goal, it's certainly not a goal of the ESP 
community, I also think it important to remember that this is an 
international meeting ...

I think what we were gathering together for was to try and address what we 
need for interoperable portals. In particular, one of the aims was for 
international interoperable portals, which means there are some constraints 
on us ...

For example, one constraint for me is that if we want a wide range of European 
data, OpenDAP is a problem until we sort out the access control issue. Sure 
we can put some data up behind opendap ... but frankly, I'm not likely to put 
a lot of effort into a portal that can't deal with a much larger proportion 
of the data I have ... (using opendapg opens up some other possibilities).

So, I think we should be addressing what we need for interoperable portals, 
and sharing information about portal technology. Much of this is indeed 
covered by the nomads faq and the previous emails we've had.

However, I think Ethan has summarised it best:

>1) What are the desired capabilities of the portal framework?
>2) What information does the portal need to satisfy those capabilities?
>       From there we can attack the painful question of
>3) How do various standards/formats map into the required information set?

to which I would add 
4) what technologies are becoming available (as opposed to in use now) ...
5) What is current best practice? i.e. let's talk about the cookbook!  It   is 
a key part of what we need ... but we should imagine it will evolve, and it 
should list the warts in our current approach.

I think we could have two half days of talks in the morning, and workshops in 
the afternoon, where we discuss the key issues.

So, if I was talking, I would talk about the NERC DataGrid data model + 
metadata model, and the concept of harvesting DIFS as a model for 
interoperability at the search level.

What I would like to hear about is more about
- thredds at a technical level, roadmap, timescales  (Ethan?)
- opendapg and the possibility of using it a grid-based portal (Don?)
- the possible use of chef in a portal environment (Dean?)
- LAS road maps and timescales (Steve?)

What I think we could usefully discuss is:
- What we *all* think the problems are with portal building ... and where we 
have solutions, make sure we get them documented in the cookbook.  
- how our various concepts will work with HDF
- what about observational data; is the CF convention adequate, if not why 
not?
- what role to international standards have in all of this? (I would recommend 
that we have Andrew Woolf talk on this subject to the meeting).
- can we make use of the DIF (either as is, or modified) as more than just 
something we "send off to GCMD". (For example, we are planning on making it a 
fundamental part of a distributed search capability in the NDG, we can tell 
you about this in more detail than last time ...).

Bryan

-- 
Bryan Lawrence, Head NCAS/British Atmospheric Data Centre
web: www.badc.nerc.ac.uk  phone: +44 1235 445012
CLRC: Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Chilton, Didcot, OX110QX, UK