OAB Review

Environmental Data Retrieval API Review by the OGC Architecture Board

2020-07-28 15:00 UTC (09:00 MDT, 11:00 EDT, 16:00 BST, 17:00 CEST, 23:00 CST, Wed 01:00 AEST)

Points to present

1. Similar Web based APIs have been in production in several national hydro-meteorological services for several years, giving rise to the Weather on the Web (WotW) proposal. Mainly point, time-series, vertical profiles and areas.

2. Much work was done on Met Ocean extensions and profiles of WCS, driven by international aviation and defence requirements, but the Web Coverage service has not proved scalable enough, for both big data and many users simultaneously.

3. At a TC meeting a year ago, it was pointed out that the data patterns were not specific to Met Ocean, so EDR was chosen as a name. It could actually be GDR - Geo-spatio-temporal Data Retrieval, but we thought that too pretentious and a perhaps a step too far.

4. Geospatial use cases that could work:

   4.1 Retrieve bone density from a 3D MRI scan, at a position or along a track.

   4.2 Retrieve colour from a location on a microscope slide.

   4.3 A case that would NOT work: retrieve the 997th Single Nucleotide Polymerase mutation from a sample of Y-DNA, or readout a specific AGCT codon.

5. There are several implementations tracking the standard (Mark Burgoyne Met Office prototype, US NWS demonstrator, ESRI facade on ArcImage Server, Met Office production code, IBL both community and commercial implementations). Also interests to implement from several meteorological services and one oceanographic service.

6. Technical content of queries been very stable for several weeks. Future technical content is known (ensembles, derived data, control over retrieval process, ...)

7. Main issue is tracking and consistency with other APIs, and producing a simple to use document for web developers and end users. Another issue is common handling of incorrectly specified parameters, and how to return useful, humane, info to a 400 bad request)? Not an issue, but important: discovery and query metadata (e.g. API-Records)

8. Demos: URLs here please.

   1. Mark Burgoyne http://labs.metoffice.gov.uk/edr2/
   2. Shane Mill https://data-api.mdl.nws.noaa.gov/EDR-API
   3. Igor Andruska http://ogcie.iblsoft.com:8089/oab/
   4. Pete Trevelyan ESRI Image Server facade?
   5. Dave Blodgett https://github.com/opengeospatial/Environmental-Data-Retrieval-API/wiki/Monitoring-network-mockup
   6. [Added after the meeting] Peng Yue http://geos.whu.edu.cn/whu-edr-demo/

9. The spec. at http://docs.opengeospatial.org/DRAFTS/19-086.html

OAB's response

NOTUC to release for Public Review.

It was suggested that the public be asked for suggestions for simplifying and making the document easier to understand.