4.10.2013 EnvDataEnr

Meeting 4 October 2013, 14:30 pm

Google Hangout

Present: GP, Lino, Anton, Julien, Fabrice, Edward

Notes

The call was planned specifically to discuss way forward with the Environmental Data Enrichment (EDE), and the potential involvement of US NODC. We have to come up with a concrete set of questions to ask from NODC. Questions are partly technical, partly organizational. Technical: how was the 4D interpolation done in order to produce the World Ocean Atlas (WOA) on the basis of the World Ocean Database (WOD)? Which tools were used? Can those tools be made available to iMarine? And organizational: how much time and effort can NODC invest in this activity? Does NODC need to be compensated for this effort from iMarine resources in order for us to be able to count on their collaboration? In order to prepare for the conference call, Edward circulated the mails exchanged with NODC to all participants on the call, and circulated also a document summarizing those conversations, with some issues for discussion - see http://goo.gl/4epExD for the latter.

Edward will produce a one-page document describing a possible web service/EDE tool for the iMarine infrastructure; part of the document will explain how such a service will benefit the scientific community in general, but also how it will contribute to specific, other iMarine activities such as AquaMaps.

Who will take EDE further? Who within iMarine will coordinate? To be discussed between Nicolas (as coordinator of the Biodiversity Cluster) and coordinators of other relevant clusters. We also need a discussion internal to iMarine, to see what resources and expertise are still available; Lino to coordinate.

Contacting NODC does not imply a restriction to WOD as a source for the EDE – but it is a good starting point: it is the source of raw data for many other systems (including BioOracle) – being close to the source is an advantage; WOD integrates and quality controls data from a large number of individual providers. WODSelect could be explored further; now it is not trivial to get machine access to WOD data through WODSelect, as the web interface is built with human end-user in mind. We also need to check the documentation distributed with WOA, as this discusses how WOA is derived from WOD. This documentation is available from the NODC web site, at http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/WOA09/pubwoa09.html, where there is one document for each parameter discussing data sources, quality control and data manipulation (including interpolation). For Temperature, for example, the relevant document is on ftp://ftp.nodc.noaa.gov/pub/WOA09/DOC/woa09_vol1_text.pdf and the relevant section is chapter 3 starting page 7.

Terradue has created functionality to extract data in an area of interest, around the biological observations; a demonstration exists on the basis of BioOracle data. What remains to be done is to do a 4D interpolation based on the extracted data.

Julien has been talking to colleagues/physical oceanographers about the kind of 4d interpolation we were hoping to perform. It is possible that a real 4D interpolation will not be possible, especially where there are too many missing data. Discussions with NODC will help to clarify what is and what is not possible.

Julien also reminds us of a mail he circulated earlier, in which there are hyperlinks to relevant tools, notable NetCDF Subset Service (NCSS ): NCSS enables subset of netCDF through a Web ServiceSelf-contained, self-describing, modular application that can be published, located, and invoked across the Web. Web services perform functions that can be anything from simple requests to complicated business processes. Once a Web service is deployed, other applications (and other Web services) can discover and invoke the deployed service. as well as "Grid as point requests": http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/projects/THREDDS/tech/interfaceSpec/NetcdfSubsetService_4_3.html. A web interface is here: http://mdst-macroes.ird.fr:8084/thredds/ncss/grid/macroes/world/sst/modis/1d/1m/w1_modis_sst2_4km_months_20070101_20071231.r2010.0.qual0.extrac.avg.float.nc/pointDataset.html (you need to check the parameter, sst in this case, enter lat and long of your point and a period of time). "Grid as point requests" can be used to get a list of environmental parameters for a set of coordinates.

GP mentions another relevant web site, at http://gher-diva.phys.ulg.ac.be/web-vis/diva.html.

Next meeting

Friday 11 October 2013, 14:30, Google Hangout. Lino will call us, Edward will send out reminders.