10/02/17 TC

Attendees: Rich Ullman, Yonsook Enloe, Ananth Rao, Allan Doyle, Helen Conover, Daniel Jacob, John Scialdone, Glenn Cunningham, Ed Armstrong, Gao Chen, Siri Jodha Khalsa, Emily Law, Michael Burnett, Barry Weiss, Rob Toaz, Peter Leonard, Tom Bicknell

Next SPG telecon: Wed March 17th at 3pm ET

Action Items:

• March 17 – Rich will develop a workshop purpose statement for the July 22nd SPG workshop.
• March 17 – Rich will contact Chris Mattman and invite him to give a talk on reference architectures at the July 22nd SPG workshop.
• March 17- Siri Jodha will identify a candidate speaker from EPA for reference architecture workshop

Notes/Discussion:

• SPG newsletter was distributed via email lists. Rich said that we will hire a better photographer at the next SPG meeting (in July) and pay double what we paid Siri Jodha.
• We will have an SPG workshop at the ESIP Federation meeting in Knoxville, TN. The ESIP Federation meeting runs July 20-23rd.
• The SPG workshop will be on Thursday July 22nd and will be focused on reference architectures. One potential speaker for the workshop would be Chris Mattman. Rich will contact Chris. The workshop could explore the proper place and role of reference architectures. Another potential speaker to invite – George Percivall who is the chief architect at OGC. Another potential area – OAIS reference architecture. What is it about OAIS that makes it useful as a standard. When inviting speakers, it would be useful to have a purpose of workshop statement. Rich will develop the workshop purpose statement. There is already a hotel block reserved at the Hilton for the ESIP Fed meeting. If you know you will be at the meeting, you may as well reserve your hotel room before they run out.
• Allan Doyle gave the status of the DAP2 Mapping RFC. The authors are still working on a revision to respond to the review comments. Authors Kent Yang and James Gallagher have been pulled off the rewrite for their other work but will get back to it.
• Daniel Jacob gave the ICARTT RFC status. Gao has updated the RFC in response to review comments. The co-author is still revising his section and taking a little longer to do that. Final revision should be ready soon.
• Daniel gave the CF RFC status. The TWG is finalizing the review questions. The CF RFC should be ready to start its public review soon after that. However, there are two issues that came up wrt to CF RFC.
  • What should we do about the documents presented as weblinks in the RFC that are versioned differently with or without the underlying specs change? The weblink document is the keywords/valids and this document is expected to change much more frequently than the conventions part of the spec. SPG agreed that we can use the weblink to point to the valids document. The SPG will approve a specific version of this document and archive a copy of that version. However, the SPG can provide links to the newest version of the valids as they are developed. SPG can decide, version by version, if SPG needs to review the latest version of the valids document or just give information on the website that a newer version is available.
  • The CF is always backwards compatible. The TWG recommendation is that the standardization be done for a specific version with minor RFC updates issued when the CF version changes provided the software clients using CF conventions do not break. Can this be a general rule or should this be done on a case by case basis? If the data model itself changes, then it is a major revision and definitely should be reviewed again by the SPG. SPG should decide case by case as newer versions of the CF are issued.

• Gao noted that there is scanning software available for ICARTT. Can we store this software on the SPG website? Better place to store freeware software is at sourceforge.net. Gao will check into it.
  • Ananth gave an update on the ECHO Metadata Model RFC. There are minor editorial issues with the RFC. Andy Mitchell just sent a revision for the minor edits. Should be ready to review.
  • Rich gave an update on the Reference Architecture RFC. The RFC is not ready. The ESDIS WG is looking at how to create a reference architecture RFC.
  • NetCDF4 RFC – Helen said we have not received that submission yet.
• Decadal Survey mission teams – Rich is trying to set up the first bi-lateral telecon with ICESAT2 and DesDYNI. Both these are 7-9 years from launch and are early in the mission formulation phase.
  • Siri Jodha gave an update on the GEO Standards Interoperability Forum. SIF is working on an interoperability guidelines part of the data strategy to be discussed at the upcoming GEO ADC meeting in early March.
  • Daniel gave an update on the IOOS DMAC – the NOAA Interagency WG on Ocean Observations have overall program responsibility for the IOOS DMAC now. Ann Ball stepped down as IOOS DMAC chair. But she will provide names of potential reviewers for the NetCDF4.

SMAP Telecon Discussion immediately following:

• Barry Weiss noted that if Steve Kempler is interest in sharing data across decadal survey missions – he’d like to keep informed about that.
• SMAP has decided to use HDF5 as the file format.
• SMAP will have 3 soil moisture products (radar, radiometry, and combined product using both instruments). Plots for these 3 products are to be done the same way. Looking to use Panoply because it can take in HDF5 but uses CF metadata. HDF5 with CF conventions can be done.
• Barry asked about terminology – granules and collections vs dataset and dataset series. Also “aggregation”. Should reference architecture standardize vocabulary?
• Standard terminology is very useful. Barry is planning to put together a document of definitions of common terminology.
• SMAP team coming to the DC area on March 4 & 5 for meetings. They will spend one day at GSFC. Rich noted that he will be out of town unfortunately.