Met Ocean plugfest 2017

Where: SHMU, Bratislava, Slovakia with the support of IBL

When: 31 May 2017 as part of the EGOWS 2017 meeting

Background

The past years EGOWS meetings also held a OGC Met Ocean plug fest. These were mostly concerned with WMS services (see 2016 report as example). This year it was decided to concentrate on WCS 2.0 services.

As part of the plugfest also the list of Met Ocean OGC web services was updated.

Servers used

Two services were mostly tested. They are described in detail with examples at WCSMetOceanProfileExamples (and listed under Met Ocean OGC web services)

• IBL WCS 2.0
• ECMWF EarthServer 2 WCS 2.0 service using rasdaman

Findings

• A key problem is the lack of clients; especially ones which allow you to browse the contenet what a WCS 2.0 server offers
  • For example the well established GIS tool QGIS could not connect with WCS 2.0 services. A plugin seem to be available for newer versions of WCS, but participants were not able to install it.
• When you know what you can get and how it is easy to build a bespoke service
• To have productive plugfests on WCS we need to collect good use cases. We started a page to collect use cases (also beyond this meeting): WCSMetOceanProfileExamples
• More detailed technical findings
  • EarthServer
    • Service URLs require the version "2.0.11" even though it is a "2.0.1" service
    • Coverage description refers to common CRS URI with http://localhost:8080 (e.g. see http://earthserver.ecmwf.int/rasdaman/ows?service=WCS&version=2.0.1&request=DescribeCoverage&coverageId=temp2m response - it contains references to http://localhost:8080)
    • Returned data does not contain meta data and information on location (lat/lon). Compare
      • http://earthserver.ecmwf.int/rasdaman/ows?service=WCS&version=2.0.1&request=GetCoverage&coverageId=temp2m&subset=ansi(%222013-12-15T00:00%22)&format=application/gml+xml&SUBSET=Long,http://localhost:8080/def/crs/EPSG/0/4326(17.2)&SUBSET=Lat,http://localhost:8080/def/crs/EPSG/0/4326(47.2)
      • https://ogcie.iblsoft.com/metocean/wcs?SERVICE=WCS&VERSION=2.1.0&REQUEST=GetCoverage&COVERAGEID=GFS_Latest_AGL&SUBSET=long,CRS:84(17.2)&SUBSET=lat,CRS:84(47.2)&SUBSET=t,http://www.opengis.net/def/trs/ISO-8601/0/Gregorian+UTC("2017-06-03T12:00:00Z","2017-06-06T12:00:00Z")&SUBSET=z,http://codes.wmo.int/grib2/codeflag/4.5/103(2)&RANGESUBSET=temperature&FORMAT=JSON&INTERPOLATION=long(linear)&INTERPOLATION=lat(linear)
  • The gvSIG sofware fails to connect to EarthServer WCS - This is because gvSIG send get capabilities without VERSION http://earthserver.ecmwf.int/rasdaman/ows?REQUEST=GetCapabilities&SERVICE=WCS&EXCEPTIONS=XML. Is this incorrect or should it work without version number?

• Examples of results at the plugfest: Metview (left) showing GRIB data retreived from the IBL WCS 2.0 test services and QGis (right) not wanting to handle WCS 2.0 services.
  

-- StephanSiemen - 02 Jun 2017