Distributor NILU

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NILU , Norwegian Institute of Air Research, EBAS

EBAS is hosting observation data of atmospheric chemical composition and physical properties submitted by data originators in support of a number of national and international programs ranging from monitoring activities to research projects.

Contact Manager: Aasmund Vik , afv@nilu.no

Contact Programmer: Paul Eckhardt , pe@nilu.no

Links to Reports, Presentations

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Distributor Status in Data Network

WCS Protocol(s) : WCS 1.1.2

WCS Protocol Description : AQ Comm. Server

Other OGC Protocol(s) : WFS 2.0 for Station Description

Data Types Served : Point Station

Data in Catalog

Data Registered, Description : This prototype server offers a subset of the EBAS holdings through a web service interface. .... more description here

View Data

Distributor Status Comments : WCS server is not accessible at the moment :(

Status, Impediments, Plans

P. Eckhardt: We have implemented the AQ Community WCS server at NILU as a system separate from the operational/production server. Through replication of the operational database into prototype we can shield the operational system from negative impacts. A small fraction of the production database (EMEP) is transferred to the WCS prototype. The WCS has been running since the beginning of 2011. The served EMEP AQ monitoring data data has been explored through the WCS client at DataFed.

With regard to the impediment, I have three main points:

• As many of you know, I had a problem with the WCS protocol. For our purposes, the data access protocol must support 'point observation' data. The current WCS protocol is geared toward delivering spatial coverages, i.e the concentration of pollutants at specific discrete locations. However, beyond the concentration spatial or temporal coverage we also need to deliver considerable amount of metadata related to the monitoring station, the measurement method, and the sensor information. Over the past two days I have learned that new developments on the standards now allow the delivery of much richer payload. We still need to evaluate if the new extended CF-netCDF binary file format will allow the incorporation of the most important metadata for point observations. This would mean that we have to pay more attention to the standardization of the payload in addition with standardized data query language.
• Funding for adoption of the protocol is another impediment. At this time there is no firm funding commitment. However, the strong interest at NILU in this standard based networking process may lead to more specific commitments by the management
• A special NILU-specific issue is that whatever we do will need to be usable and applicable immediately. This may not be a significant issue for the server development.

A. Vik: Data versioning is necessary to reflect changes/revisions in the published data. In EBAS, we identify batches of observations at a given location as 'datasets'. Each dataset has a (last) revision date. It is suggested that this last-revision-time timestamp is a useful and versioning approach. Additional flags on observation level is also necessary.
T. Dye: Multiple dates in the record would confuse broad range of users
M. Schultz: The data version information (date) is for the machine, not the human (end) user