Ocean Science Interoperability Experiment

Summary

The Oceans Science Interoperability Experiment will consolidate a portion of the Ocean-Observing community on its understanding of various OGC specifications, solidify demonstrations for Ocean Science application areas, harden software implementations, and produce a candidate OGC Best Practices document that can be used to inform the broader ocean-observing community. To achieve these goals, the Oceans IE will engage the OGC membership to assure that any community recommendations coming from the Oceans group will properly leverage the OGC specifications. Potentially, Change Requests on OGC Specification will be provided to the OGC Technical Committee to influence the underlying specifications. It is not anticipated that this IE will develop any new specifications.

Initiator Organizations

The OGC members that are acting as initiators of the Interoperability Experiment are:

• Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA)
• Texas A&M University – Academy for Advanced Telecommunications (TAMU)
• National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
• The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI)
• Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System (GoMOOS)

Description

The Ocean IE will advance several areas of understanding and application of OGC specifications in to web services for interoperable ocean science. The IE will apply existing specifications in the context of an Ocean Science scientific domain. The IE will refine and inform specs, rather than develop new specs. The GALEON IE is a good example in applying WCS access to Atmospheric data.

The Ocean IE will focus on these areas:

• Web Services for Interoperable Ocean Science.
• OGC WMS and WFS access to ocean data, focusing on SOAP bindings.
• Application of the OGC Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for Web Services to Ocean-observing applications.
• Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) in particular Observations & Measurements and SensorML.
• Sensor Observation Service (SOS) for raw observations.
• GML application schema for Ocean data semantic interoperability using RDF-based onotologies.
• Develop an end-to-end demonstration of web services increasing the interoperability of various regional real-time, ocean-observing programs.

A desired outcome from an interoperability experiment is some kind of "Best Practices" document for the use of OGC adopted spec by a community of interest. The report will be posted as an OGC pending document for consideration by the OGC Specification Program, i.e., the OGC consensus process. This kind of "Best Practice" document would show how to use an OGC spec in specific applications.

Background

The Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) hosted a workshop in Baltimore October 2005 called OOS Tech 2005 (note: OOS = Ocean Observing System). The workshop included approximately 100 ocean scientists, data mangers and computer science experts from around the country. They learned and talked about "Web Services for Interoperable Ocean Science." After the workshop, a subset of the group agreed to work together on a follow-on activity to implement some of what they had learned. The agreed to build from their previous experiences using OGC WMS and WFS specifications. In previous years, they had built some basic elements of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) demo at www.openioos.org. The OOS Tech 2005 follow-on activity began with 5 loosely defined goals:

1. Develop an end-to-end demonstration of web services increasing the interoperability of various regional real-time, ocean-observing programs,
2. Gain some experience with data exchange using SOAP with different tools on multiple platforms and implementations (e.g., SOAP::Lite and Apache/Axis),
3. leverage previous experiences with WMS and WFS that gave rise to the informal and grass-roots www.OpenIOOS.org interoperability test bed activity,
4. leverage the Marine Metadata Interoperability demo focused on semantic interoperability using RDF-based onotologies,
5. leverage results of a NOAA Coastal Services Center salinity workshop in September 2005.

The small OOS Tech follow-on team formed their own "service-definition" team and began developing some simple SOAP interface definitions that leveraged various other OGC specifications, including GML, Observations & Measurements and SensorML. These 6-10 dedicated individuals spent several months and implemented some test examples using SOAP::Lite and Apache/Axis servers. These are now being visualized by a SOAP::Lite client that provide data aggregation and mapping capabilities to support www.openioos.org In achieving this proof of concept, the OOS Tech service-definition team struggled with various OGC specifications, including: GML, WFS, Observations & Measurements and SensorML. The service-definition team would like to consolidate their experiences into something that will allow the rest of the OOS community to benefit.